Curious Displays is the thesis project of Julia Yu Tsao (Sept 2009), a concept that explores our future relationship with displays in the home. What if our display was ‘alive’, like little swarming bugs? What if your nano display was intelligent, connected to objects in your house and your communications?

Curious Displays is a product proposal for a new platform for display technology. Instead of a fixed form factor screen, the display surface is instead broken up into hundreds of ½ inch display blocks. Each block operates independently as a self-contained unit, and has full mobility, allowing movement across any physical surface. The blocks operate independently of one another, but are aware of the position and role relative to the rest of the system. With this awareness, the blocks are able to coordinate with the other blocks to reconfigure their positioning to form larger display surfaces and forms depending on purpose and function.

Via.

Enigmatica is a research project by Kit Webster, it’s about combining light, sound and space to create multi-dimensional synesthetic environments.

And another striking treatment, this time stop motion:

The “Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus” by Julius von Bismarck & Benjamin Maus is a drawing machine illustrating a never-ending story by the use of patent drawings.

The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents — linked by over 22 million references — form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents.

Glance by Andy Holtin

I managed to get myself over to the Kinetica art fair yesterday, a show curated from artists specialising in kinetic, electronic, robotic, light, sound and time-based works.

The exhibition was a visual extravaganza of electronic wizardry and macabre machines - confirmed by my 5 year old son Robin who for once didn’t moan that he was hungry throughout - although he did want the beer poured from a robotic waiter.

For me this piece, entitled Trace by Balint Bolygo was the stand out. The work consisted of a revolving plaster cast of a person’s head which was slowly deconstructed into a mathematical diagram.

This happened using a mechanical contraption that relayed the changing contours of the heads rotation to a pen connected via a series of metal arms, resulting in these impressive drawings:

Pic courtesy of The Telegraph

Pic courtesy of Chris O’Shea

For other works, also see Pixelsumo’s review who I’m glad to say was in agreement, plus see the Beeb for a vid.

Very Slow Scan Television (VSSTV) by Gebhard Sengmüller is a new television format that we have developed building upon Slow Scan Television (SSTV), an image transmission system used by Ham Radio amateurs. VSSTV uses broadcasts from this historic public domain television system and regular bubble wrap to construct an analogous system: Just as a Cathode Ray Tube mixes the three primary colors to create various hues, VSSTV utilizes a plotter-like machine to fill the individual bubbles with one of the three primary CRT colors, turning them into pixels on the VSSTV “screen”. Large television images with a frame rate of one per day are the result, images that take the idea of slow scan to the extreme.

Via.

An image of the Holy Mother made of Easter eggs has gone on display at the St Sophia Cathedral in Kiev, Ukraine. About 15,000 hand-painted eggs were used by Ukrainian artist Oksana Mas to create the piece.

s

The ROBOTAGGER, built by Golan Levin, is an industrial robot arm programmed with GML, the new “Graffiti Markup Language” created by Evan Roth and pals at the FAT Lab:

GML is a new XML file type specifically designed for archiving graffiti tags. What it enables is the transfer of graffiti tags from creator to another destination, via computer. So what that means is your tag could be drawn on the other side of the world from where you are in realtime.

What the Robotagger does is brings this virtualised format back into the real world.

Lets do a collective mural.

League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots is a Brooklyn-based group of artists and technologists who create robotic musical instruments. Founded in 2000 by musician and engineer Eric Singer, LEMUR creates exotic, sculptural musical instruments which integrate robotic technology. LEMUR’s philosophy is to build robots that are new types of musical instruments, as opposed to animatronic robots that play existing instruments.

ForestBot

GuitarBot

ModBots

Mesmerising:

It’s amazing how much the work of Dutch artist and kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen continues to inspired people. Here’s one of his “Strandbeest” walking mechanisms done in paper.

Such complex movements achieved with paper! Via.