Beeps-a-Lot Box, Arcane Device, and Stylophonic Device each answer a question I hadn’t considered: What would have happened if H.R. Giger had decided to teach band? These graceful sculptures are working musical instruments produced by Gulf Coast artisan Mike Ford Designed to evoke curiosity as well as admiration, each is heavy with mysterious controls, indicators, […]
If seeing a tandem bike riding by makes you momentarily pause and have a look, imagine your delay when a 15-person bicycle-truck slowly passes by. Called the Busycle, this bicycle behemoth moves under the power of 28 human legs, plus a driver. And while it can only go about 4 miles per hour, the infectious […]
If you’re driving through the rural town of Panama, N. Y., and forgot to wear a watch, you’re in luck. Engineer John Miktuk used scrap LEDs and a GPS to assemble a giant clock on the side of his garage. The timekeeper began as a sign of self-appreciation. Miktuk had a bunch of red LEDs […]
Photograph by Thomas Hartkop Mike and Dave Hartkop had been eyeing their father’s abandoned satellite dish in the garage for years. But it took an especially productive night of brainstorming at the local pub to come up with an idea that tapped into their respective interests in coffee and solar energy to put that dish […]
“A custom-made life is better than a Wal-Mart world,” says Sean Barrow. Tall, dark, and tattooed, Barrow looks more like a rock star than the avid eco-design aficionado he is. His post-apocalyptic appearance at first glance seems at odds with the elegant, minimal, Japa-nese-inspired aesthetic he studies and employs in his sustainable furniture making. But […]
Matt Jones contemplates life by building moving sculptures that fail to replicate it. A graduate student in art at Stanford University, his investigations have led him, among other things, to use an air compressor to animate a respiratory system fashioned from old bicycle inner tubes, and to motorize a carpet of zip ties laced with […]
Those with doctorates in artificial intelligence are never the best stewards of houseplants. Programmer Bryan Horling says he’s killed whole swaths of greenery inside and outside his rural western Massachusetts home. But at least one plant will survive, thanks to a computer-controlled plant watering system — a simple network of plastic tubing and an aquarium […]
