art

Fluorescent tube mechanical character display

Rob Seward’s Four Letter Words takes a unique approach to displaying text, using elegantly animated miniature fluorescent tubes – The piece displays an algorithmically generated word sequence, derived from a word association database developed by the University of South Florida between 1976 and 1998. The algorithms take into account word meaning, rhyme, letter sequencing, and […]

Maker Faire: Digital Graffiti Wall

Maker Faire: Digital Graffiti Wall

Every day I hear about another exciting project that will be at this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area, taking place this weekend, May 22nd and 23rd, at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. One project I can’t wait to see and play with is the Tangible Graffiti Wall, brought from Vancouver by Tangible Interaction‘s Alex Biem. The […]

Get your smash on at “sport” bottle recycling center

Get your smash on at “sport” bottle recycling center

When I was still living in Dallas, our local recycling center included a giant steel dumpster, open at only one end, with an elevated platform you could climb up to chuck your glass bottles in. I was in high school, then, and it was pretty common, when we were bored, to go down there on the weekend and pass an hour or so smashing glass bottles into the dumpster just for the fun of it. You’d see “grown-ups” there doing the same thing, and more than once perfectly “respectable” suburban adults would see what we were up to and join in, which inevitably put a big grin on everybody’s face. I’m sure this kind of impromptu bottle-breaking game happens naturally at recycling centers all over the world.