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 […]
When Ken Schroeder was repairing appliances for a living, he decided that a spring-loaded switch from a dishwasher would be ideal as a trigger for some kind of device that his dog, Bender, could activate. Two years later, while studying industrial design at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Ken mounted the switch behind the sensor […]
Photography by Amber Henshaw The area around the house of Azmeraw Zeleke in northern Ethiopia is littered with burnt-out mortar shells left over from a war with neighboring Eritrea. For months, Azmeraw wondered what he could do with them as he saw them being sold around Mekele town (about 800km from the capital, Addis Ababa). […]
Photograph by Muriel Thies If you love the look of movies such as The Nightmare Before Christmas and The City of Lost Children, there’s a sculptor out there after your own heart. In fact, none of Stรยฉphane Halleux’s darkly whimsical renderings — robotic wheelchairs, squat submarines, armored cars, men with mechanical bat wings, animal soldiers […]
Photography by Simon Jansen New Zealander Simon Jansen has all the bona fides of an alpha maker. A software engineer and classic car restorer, he’s got a half-built R2-D2 and a custom minibike he made from scratch. He achieved geek fame with his ASCII animation of Star Wars scenes (asciimation.co.nz), which practically defined obsessive attention […]
A Washington native, Claude Zervas brings his background as a software engineer to a fine art practice using technology and related apparatuses rather than paint and canvas as a medium. Zervas’ predominant subject matter for the past few years has been the Northwest’s verdant and extreme landscape: dense evergreen forests, glacier-melt rivers, and strange roadside […]
