I had a fun time at Kinetica, the Museum of Kinetic Art, in Old Spitalfields Market, just 5 minutes walk from Liverpool Street.
There are a whole bunch of crazy and witty automata - including the work of Paul Spooner - remember to take enough of 20p pieces for the machines!
I saw their current exhibit is the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre & The Ride of Life, but that finishes at the end of the week (5th May). Here’s a movie:
Thoroughly recommended,
Dave
A colleague just posted his experiments with interactive games:
Some kind of Jump ‘n Run game controlled by voice, a light source and the keyboard. It’s german, but worth to have a look at it. Sources and example movie available for download at:
http://www.derhess.de/experimente.php?id=4
Cheers,
Pat
This is great - take a look at: http://theamazingrolo.blogspot.com/2007/03/wii-loop-machine.html
The Wii Loop Machine is a system for using the wireless Wii remote to sync, control, and manipulate sampled loops in real time. It works on Mac OS X with Max/MSP.
I have a spare remote (or wiimote) if anyone wants to give it a try.
I’ve been collecting a bunch of links on surprising things you can do with the wii here: http://www.davidchatting.com/?tags=wii
Cheers,
Dave
I’m planning to have a BEAM robotics workshop at the next Curiosity Show (Saturday 7th April, St-Mary-At-The-Quay, Ipswich, 10am to 4pm).
BEAM is an acronym that stands for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics and Mechanics. As such BEAM robotics promotes the value of biological forms and aesthetics in the design of the “creature”, where “form follows function”. The behaviours are usually reactive, for instance to light or sound and the circuits simple, using the fewest possible components. The components themselves are often recycled, soldered together in a free-form way (without a circuit board) making the creature’s body. Many are solar-powered.
There are loads of different types of BEAM robots; some move like the Solar Rollers and others like the Sitters sit! There are many examples out there - some of my favourites are the work of Zach DeBord.
So my proposal is to bring together people, electronics and soldering irons on Saturday 7th and build some BEAM robots for ourselves. If you’re interested in participating, please let me know - I’m going to need quite a bit of help to make this happen.
Cheers,
Dave
I’ve managed to pick up a really old scanner (HP ScanJet 5P). I’m not even sure if it works and I dont even recognise the connections on the back of it (SCSI I assume), but I thought it might be possible to do some projects with it.
Have a look below for some inspiration:
Scan Jam
HP Scanjet Music
Scanner Photography Project
Anyone interested?
This Youtube snippet combines sound synthesis and the multi-touch table. Wild.
Thanks to Nigel Crawley for letting us know about this.
Looks like Nigel gave up blogging in June 2005, but he’s still out there in the real world, and I met up with him at Barcamp.
Welcome back to the blogosphere Nigel!
Without further ado, here’s the movie.
Find out more about the animations I’ve been recovering from Muybridge plates as part of my Zoetrope experiments (animations inlined below).
Visit my blog for more detail and code used.
There’s also an electronic arts event ‘Faster than Sound’ at Lakenheath airbase to put in the diary for June 9th 2007.
Amazingly it’s happening again! Well worth the trip last year, and even worth the fairly steep ticket price I thought.
Read a taster at http://cefn.com/blog/fasterthansound.html and I can show you a bunch more footage too of all the other tens of techno-art pieces if you’re interested.
GAME/PLAY at The Ipswich Town Hall Galleries looks really interesting,
“Game / Play is a national touring exhibition that explores goal-orientated gaming and playful interaction through media arts practice; focusing on the rhetorical constructs game and play.“
It’s on until 28th April - anyone like to do a review for the blog?
Cheers,
Dave
Found some funny stuff for MacBook Pro’s as well:
Protects the MacBook from theft, the funny way.
VirtueDesktops (hope that’s right. BT Block.)
Virtual desktops with slap- and light-switching.