This virtual music wrist band is one of the many modern technologies created in the name of the fun interactive and responsive arts. Made by Japan’s Megahouse company, this motion-sensitive instrument automatically plays the next chord in the song every time you strum with your wrist. It is powered by 2 AAA batteries, and contains…
Category: Past Student Work
Jaume Plensa’s “The Crown Fountain” in Millenium Park
This is The Crown Fountain in Chicago’s own Millenium park. There are two 50 ft. glass towers at each end of a shallow reflecting pool. Plensa took pictures of the faces of 1,000 Chicago residents, and they faces are displayed onto the LED screens. There is a water outlet giving the illusion that these faces…
David Byrne’s Battery Maritime Building Project
Link to New York Times video of the installationArtist/musician David Byrne has this summer presented “Playing the Building”, a work in which the entirety of an empty ferry terminal building is converted into a musical instrument. An antique pump-style organ is used as the interface to “play” the structure- the workings of the organ have…
Radiohead’s House of Cards Video
“Radiohead just released a new video for its song ‘House of Cards’ from the album ‘In Rainbows’. No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne Lidar…
Toriton Plus
Sebastian Tomczak’s Toriton Plus allows the user to manipulate a synthesizer by displacing water in a bowl.
Mike McCracken’s Audio Ping Pong
Mike McCracken’s Audio Ping Pong using “an arduino, headphones and an accelerometer” to retrofit pong into an audio game. The object of the game is to tilt your head along with where the “ball” sounds like it is in space, if you stray off this path, you lose the game. As the game continues, the…
Techno Impressionist Museum
The curator of this web museum claims that ” Techno impressionism is the last art movement of the 20th century and the first art movement of the 21st.” That may be so, although I would tend to group it in with new media art which has been around since the 1960’s ( or if you…
Famicon NES Case
This is a cool mod out of France; an entire Famicon console housed in a NES game cartridge. It has two controller ports, video out, and even a reset switch. Unfortunately, the mod does require the destruction of a cartridge, but I certainly have a few old video game cartridges which no longer work or…
city-scale energy consumption
This coal burning power plant has become the target for an eco-visualization project. The title of the project is Nuage Vert (green cloud), and its purpose is to illuminate the vapor of the burning coal with a neon green laser beam. This is projected above the city and as the cloud grows bigger, it is…
Turn Signal Biking Jacket
In the world of wearables, the LilyPad Arduino, a washable set of sensors and electronic components, is allowing for innovative new wearable electronics. Leah Buechley used the LilyPad Arduino to create a biking jacket that displays turn signals. To activate, the user simple clicks a button within their wrist and the turn signal responds accordingly….
Cute Little Firefighting Bots
Sorry, this little guy is only a concept now, but the industrial-design studio at the University of Magdeburg-Stendal is very pleased with OLE ( off-road loeschenheit, auf Deutsch, or off-road extinguishing apparatus). Ole will be equipped with water tanks and powdered fire extinguishing agents, and presumably will be guided by GPS. The designer says a…
Solar Balloons Offer Low-Cost Energy
What could be more refreshing than casting off your carbon shackles with a bunch of solar balloons? Environmental architect visionary, Joseph Cory, of Geotectura has seized this dream with an award winning way to take solar energy to the skies. He’s teamed up with Technion aerospace engineer Dr. Pini Gurfil to develop an an array…