Changethethought™

Artist Nick Gentry has found a muse on our throwaway culture. He paints onto discarded computer disks and cassette tapes.

Here is a a section pulled from his artist statement:
“Since graduating from Central St Martins in 2006, the focus has been to explore how technological advancement is affecting society. Throughout history, information has always been recorded on physical objects. Important documents, favourite songs, videos and more were stored on mountains of tapes, polaroids, cassettes and disks. As media is rapidly absorbed into the World Wide Web the rich variety of formats of the past are becoming obsolete.”

written by Christopher | tags: Art, Nick Gentry, Painting, pop art, Technology

Photographer Joshua Scott has an ability to bring life to lifeless objects and throw them into a spinning array of stunning color.

written by Christopher | tags: Joshua Scott, Objects, Photography, Technology

I just stumbled upon Pranav Mistry’s talk at Ted India via the (still and always inspiring) Surfstation blog and was completely blown away by his work at developing what is inarguably some of the most groundbreaking practical application technology out there. Yes, I am prone to exaggeration (I do work in advertising after all) but I am not inflating this. Mistry’s work could really revolutionize the entire computer and interactive industry. His emphasis is on bridging digital data with the physical world in the hopes that we can one day rise from behind our computers and again live physically. It really is something that has to be seen to be believed, but it left me terribly excited. I cannot wait for the day that this technology makes it into the commercial market.

written by Christopher | tags: India, Interacative, Pranav Mistry, Technology, TED

I just saw this posted at Surfstation and decided (after reading a passionately written post) to listen to a talk by Gordon Brown as part of a recent TED conference. Brown delivers a really unique talk for a man in his position and really espouses some unusual views on how he believes the world is being shaped by emerging technology. The juxt of his position being that we are now in a unique era where we have a genuine opportunity for real change driven by people who are able to connect instantaneously. It’s a ballsy thing to put into the stream of consciousness from a politician but that is exactly why it is hard not to take it as a genuinely heart felt cry for real change and progress.

written by Christopher | tags: Gordon Brown, Internet, Politics, Technology, TED

Two German biotech experts have decided to convert the entire human genome into audio and stream it over the internet. They estimate that it will take about 23.5 years until the entirety of the code has been distributed over the internet. They are also generating imagery that you can see above (looks like static).

Why? I don’t know. Interesting and kind of awesome? Yes.

written by Christopher | tags: Biotech, DNA Radio, Human Genome, Science, Technology

This is pretty interesting. I love seeing how this touch technology is developing. A lot of potential applications are plausible with this.

More information:
silkehilsing.de/impress

written by Christopher | tags: Impress, Technology, Touch Display

Glitch art is quickly becoming a popular craze this year. Kanye West’s most recent video (which you can watch above) utilized the effect as well at the Chairlift video I posted last week. So where can you make your own glitch art? There is a really cool site developed between Dimitre Lima (dmtr.org), Tony Scott (beflix.com) and Iman Moradi (organised.info) for New Langton Arts in San Francisco that will take your site, and more specifically the images on your site and glitch them for you. The site is aptly titled ‘Glitch Browser’ and you can try it out here. If that doesn’t satiate your glitch thirst then you can see some readymade glitch art here.

Formfiftyfive was kind enough to put all of these links together first, so be sure to give them a visit as well. Thank you for all your hard blog work FFF.

written by Christopher | tags: Art, Glitch Art, Glitch Browser, Technology

I gotta get me one of these.

written by Christopher | tags: Art, Bob Turek, Object Remix, Sculpture, Technology

British inventor Josh Silver, a former professor of physics at Oxford University, has devised water-lensed glasses that can be easily altered to meet almost any prescription.

“Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device’s tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles.

The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription.”

Such an obvious yet innovative idea. Brilliant and wonderful.

written by Christopher | tags: Daily Adjustable Glasses, Technology, Water-based Glasses

Philip Rosedale speaks at TED about his amazing creation, ‘Second Life’. I have never actually gotten involved with Second Life but I have always been amazed by the concept and it was enlightening to hear Rosedale muse on the concept. Rosedale goes by the avatar “Philip Linden” when he is living his ‘Second Life’. I really is a fascinating idea that belies a multitude of ramifications and I am sure it will only evolve further and further as time goes on. It will definitely be interesting watching it unfold and what it may inspire in the future.

written by Christopher | tags: Internet, Philip Rosedale, Second Life, Technology, TED

“The intention for this project was to make sound visible. As there is already a variety of ways in which sounds can be seen (equalizers, sub-titles, etc.), my aim was to produce a device where that representation of sound would be a physical one. I therefore used the sewing machine as the basis for the project as I feel it is synonymous with industry, and making physical products. Due to limitations in my computer programming skills this model of a stereo/sewing machine is a prototype of how I imagined the actual product would look.”

Via: Sounds Butter 

written by Christopher | tags: Product Design, Sounds Butter, Technology

This is a radically condensed demonstration of oblong’s g-speak spatial operating environment. IE: Minority Report for real (minus Tom Cruise).

written by Christopher | tags: G-Speak Spatial Operating, Oblong, Technology

Well, get ready for the electronic Newspaper. I remember reading about how it was becoming a real possibility but had no idea that the technology was still under aggressive development and this video confirmed that fact. It looks pretty damned cool.

written by Christopher | tags: Electronic Newspaper, Plastic Logic Reader, Technology

So where is the internet going? It has really only been around for about 5,000 days. So, what will happen in the next 5,000? Well, Kevin Kelly has some ideas.

written by Christopher | tags: Internet, Kevin Kelly, Technology, TED

Alright, I don’t really even pretend to be into cars. I kind of even hate having to own one in all honesty. I wish I lived in a city where I didn’t need one but there is maybe a handful of cities like that in the whole U.S. With that said, this new concept car from Audi did still manage to turn my head. It looks like one of those cars you would see in some movie about the future like Minority Report or A.I. I really thought the design was stunning and it would be pretty interesting to see something like this out on the road.

Here is a little more about it:
“The 2008 Audi O concept was designed by Ondrej Jirec, a design student from the Czech Republic who is beginning studies at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California in 2008.

The Audi O concept was designed to fuse a powerful and innovative audio system with a stylish and sporty four-seat hatchback. The exterior design uses several Audi trademark styling themes, especially at the front where the square grille sits neatly between the LED headlights. The doors feature glass windows running along the bottom edge which provide an interesting shape to the profile of the car. At the rear of the car the pullout door echoes the design of the squared off Audi grille.

The styling of the Audi O was influenced by a variety of sources including the Audi Shooting Brake concept from 2005, the Apple iPod and music.”

You can read more about it and see more images here.

written by Christopher | tags: Audi O, Concept Cars, Design, Technology

“The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 kilometer (17 mile) long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is preparing for its first small tests in early August, leading to a planned full-track test in September - and the first planned particle collisions before the end of the year. The final step before starting is the chilling of the entire collider to -271.25 C (-456.25 F). Here is a collection of photographs from CERN, showing various stages of completion of the LHC and several of its larger experiments (some over seven stories tall), over the past several years.”

You can read the full story here at The Boston Globe. There is also 27 absolutely spectacular photos of the collider companioned with the story.

written by Christopher | tags: Big Bang, Black Hole, Large Hadron Collider, Space Time, Technology

“Alex Dragulescu is a Romanian visual artist whose practice embraces both traditional and new media. His projects are experiments and explorations of algorithms, computational models, simulations and information visualizations that involve data derived from databases, spam emails, blogs and video game assets.

His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide in Madrid, Venice, Florence, Rome, Seoul, Sao Paolo, St Petersburg, La Habana, Arad, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki and the Biennial of Young Artists, Bucharest. In 2005, his software agent Blogbot, won the IBM New Media Award at the Stuttgart Festival for Expanded Media in Germany.

He has a BS in Cinema and Photography from Ithaca College and a Masters of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from University of California at San Diego. In September 2007, Dragulescu left the Experimental Game Lab + Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at UC San Diego and is now a researcher in the Social Media Group at the MIT Media Lab.”

It takes a real artist to create something beautiful out of email spam.

written by Christopher | tags: Alex Dragulescu, Art, Code, Programming, Technology

“We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

- Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar
May 2006″

This has been online for a while now and I have neglected for no good reason to remember to post it. It is really amazing and you can really get caught up, once you realize what all is possible, in playing with it. It is Web 3.0 aggregate data thinking in action.

written by Christopher | tags: Aggregation, Emotion, Technology, We Feel Fine, Web 3.0, Web Design