Wednesday, December 20, 2006

This would be really good wallpaper for a telephone nook:Made by Duncan Wilson in collaboration with Sirkka Hammer, it's interactive design that's both practical and attractive -- imagine! Wallpaper made of four layers of mildly tacky squares of grey paper, on top of a bright background. The patterns created as more and more notes were used, especially once it got really used and the only light greys were at the floor and ceiling, would be pretty fascinating. It would make for a really neat time-lapse study.
(from core77)

Tanning made useful:It's a bikini made of 1" x 4" photovoltaic film strips sewn together in series with conductive thread. That is so fancy. It terminates in a regulator into a female (duh) USB connection. They're coming out with a dude-bikini that keeps your beer cold, too, although truly, the two functions could be interchangeable, as dudes like music as much as ladies like cold beer.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Hanukkah a-go-go:
Minimalist, quick-burning menorah for your Festival of Lights on the run.
9 X 1.5 X 1 cm.
Thanks to Inhabitat.

Sunday, December 17, 2006

After all the simplicity and concision I've seen recently, this project addles my brain. "Falling garden," by Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger, is complex and beautiful. I can't decide if the wording on their site is poorly translated or an accurate verbal representation of their artwork. The materials they used are as eclectic as the rest of it:

Plastic berries (India), cow pads (Jura), waste paper (Venice), baobab seeds (Australia), beech, elder and magnolia branches (Uster), thorns (Almeria), nylon blossoms (one-dollar-shop), pigs’ teeth (Indonesia), seaweed (Seoul), orange peel (Migros shop), fertilizer crystals (home grown), pigeons’ bones (San StaĆ«), silk buds (Stockholm), cattail (Ettiswil), cats’ tails (China), celery roots (Montreal), virility rind (Caribbean), wild boar quills (zoo), banana leaves (Murten), rubber snakes (Cincinnati)...

Another of their projects, Meta-jardin, features junk juxtaposed with nature. "Growing and decomposing structures live in the same territories hand in hand. Values dissolve. A dense vegetation after the big crash!" Not unrelated to my post about Detroit.
The V&A and PlayStation have sponsored a fantastic interactive experience: Volume (totally surreal and worth clicking). A grid of about 7-foot-tall pillars with LEDs respond to the people walking through them with sound and varying light patterns, taking it one step further than Dune 4.0. United Visual Artists collaborated with Robert Del Naja (3D from Massive Attack)'s music production company, one point six.
More intuitive/interactive installations (and more alliteration) from MoCoLoco:
This one's Dune 4.0, by Daan Roosegaarde, featured at Montevideo, in Amsterdam. It consists of hundreds of fibers that dim or brighten separately in response to 70% motion stimulus, 30% sound stimulus. And it doesn't just glow happily -- based on the amount of motion and noise, it can turn into a veritable lightening storm. The video should be online in early January.