“Electrohydromechanical monster robot” for sale
Inventor Doug Malewicki, like Thomas Edison and Dean Kamen, has worked on a wide and odd variety of projects. While some have been benevolent (a mass transit monorail system, a recumbent bicycle that enabled his eight-year-old daughter to hit 30 mph) and others have been potentially sinister (a military jet pack, a “Droid of Death” unmanned aerial drone), his strangest invention of all is probably the Robosaurus, above.
ROBOSAURUS is the most incredible man made monster ever conceived. He was designed to grip, lift, crush, burn, bite and throw…full size cars and airplanes around with ease!
This 40 foot tall electrohydromechanical monster robot weighs 58,000 pounds and is totally controlled by a human pilot strapped inside the monster’s head.
The Robosaurus toured North America starting in 1990 and packs up into a trailer, meeting all U.S. Highway specifications. Retired in 2006, it’s now for sale! So if your neighbor keeps parking his SUV in front of your driveway, here’s a decisive way to end that dispute once and for all.
thanks Porter!
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Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on May 17, 2007, 10:07AM
Robosonic Eclectic: Live Music by Robots and Humans
LEMUR presents Robosonic Eclectic: Live Music by Robots and Humans :: LEMUR’s First Annual Commissioned Works Concert :: May 31-June 2, 2007 :: 3-Legged Dog Art and Technology Center.
Featuring Pop Musicians They Might Be Giants, Punk cum New Music Composer JG Thirlwell (Foetus), Electronic Music Pioneer Morton Subotnick and Jazz Trombonist and MacArthur Fellow George Lewis, Performing Live with LEMUR’s Robots; plus Solo Works for LEMUR Robots by R. Luke DuBois and J. Brendan Adamson.
LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots presents its first concert series consisting entirely of works commissioned for LEMUR’s musical robots. The program, Robosonic Eclectic: Live Music by Robots and Humans, will be performed during a three-night run, from Thursday, May 31 through Saturday, June 2, 2007, at 8 pm each night. The series will take place at the Mainstage Theatre at the new 3-Legged Dog Art and Technology Center. Robosonic Eclectic is presented as part of the New York Electronic Art Festival (NYEAF), a month-long celebration of cutting-edge electronic music performed at various venues from May 12 through June 10, 2007.
Four commissioned works, each with a live performance component, serve as the backbone of the evening, alternating with works that the robots will perform solo. Composer/performers for the live pieces are John Flansburgh and John Linnell (They Might Be Giants), JG Thirlwell (Foetus), Morton Subotnick and George Lewis. These works will feature live performances by the composer(s) of the piece, plus special guests. Pieces for solo robots by R. Luke DuBois and J. Brendan Adamson will also be performed by the robot ensemble.
Tickets are $20 and available online now from Brown Paper Tickets.
LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots is a Brooklyn-based group of artists and technologists developing 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 instruments as opposed to robots that play existing instruments. LEMUR’s growing ensemble includes over 50 robotic instruments. GuitarBot, an electric stringed instrument, is comprised of several independently controllable stringed units which can pick and slide extremely rapidly. ModBots are a large collection of modular percussion robots in a variety of styles and functions, including beaters, singing bells, and shakers. The Ill-Tempered Clangier is a robotic xylophone-like tubular bell instrument which clangs percussive melodies on forty-four tuned metal pipes. ForestBot is comprised of a forest of egg-shaped rattles sprouting from long rods that quiver and sway over onlookers. TibetBot is designed around three Tibetan singing bowls struck by robotic arms to produce a range of timbres.
They Might Be Giants (John Flansburgh and John Linnell) Combining a knack for infectious melodies with a quirky, bizarre sense of humor and a vaguely avant-garde aesthetic borrowed from the New York post-punk underground, They Might Be Giants became one of the most unlikely alternative success stories of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Musically, the duo of John Flansburgh and John Linnell borrowed from everywhere, but their freewheeling eclecticism was enhanced by their arcane, geeky sense of humor. They Might Be Giants released their eponymous debut in 1986, and the album became a college radio hit. Two years later they released Lincoln, which expanded their following considerably. Their third album, Flood, worked its way to gold status. They celebrated their 20th anniversary in summer 2002 with the release of their first children’s album, No! Early in 2005, Here Come the ABCs and its accompanying DVD were the band’s first releases for Disney Sound.
JG Thirlwell: The inscrutable JG Thirlwell was dropped on this planet some time ago to bestow sonic majesty, chaos, violence & beauty and cunning linguistics on an unsuspecting earth. A Brooklyn-based Australian ex-pat, Thirlwell has used many names for his many visions: Foetus (and its many name variations), Steroid Maximus, Clint Ruin, Wiseblood, DJ OTEFSU, Manorexia and Baby Zizanie. His multitude of influential recordings under the name FOETUS and variations thereof, has amassed a rabid world-wide cult following. Over the course of more than a dozen albums he has stretched from yearning orchestral soundscapes, meticulously organized chaos, electronic swathes, blistering big band pastiche, crunching hard rock and even inventing stupefying collisions of genres and forms with a raw emotion and irresistible musicality. More recently JG has also branched out into audio installations (the freq_out project curated by CM Von Hausswolf, with whom he also conducted an audio workshop at the Stadelschule in Frankfurt), DJ-ing (as DJ Otefsu), has appeared in an opera (Der Kastanienball in Munich in 2004, directed by Stefan Winter), has scored a cartoon series for The Cartoon Network in the USA (The Venture Brothers), and recently completed a commission for Bang On A Can. In 2005, he wrote his first commission for Kronos Quartet, which premiered in 2006.
Morton Subotnick: Known as a grandfather of electronic music, Morton Subotnick is one of the pioneers in the development of electronic music and an innovator in works involving instruments and other media, including interactive computer music systems. Most of his music calls for a computer part, or live electronic processing; his oeuvre utilizes many of the important technological breakthroughs in the history of the genre. In addition to music in the electronic medium, Subotnick has written for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, theater and multimedia productions. Currently, Subotnick holds the Mel Powell Chair in Music at the California Institute of the Arts. He tours extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe as a lecturer and composer/performer.
George Lewis: MacArthur Fellow George Lewis is currently Edwin H. Case Professor of Music at Columbia, having previously taught at UC San Diego, Mills College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Simon Fraser University’s Contemporary Arts Summer Institute. He has served as music curator for the Kitchen in New York, and has collaborated in
the “Interarts Inquiry” and “Integrative Studies Roundtable” at the Center for Black Music Research (Chicago). A member of the
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. An active composer, improvisor, performer and computer/installation artist, Lewis has explored electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated forms. His artistic work is documented in over 120 recordings and has been awarded by a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, 1999 Cal Arts/Alpert Award in the Arts, and numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
R. Luke DuBois: R. Luke DuBois is a composer, performer, video artist, and programmer living in New York City. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University and teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia’s Computer Music Center and at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. He has collaborated on interactive performance, installation, and music production work with many artists and organizations including Toni Dove, Matthew Ritchie, Todd Reynolds, Michael Joaquin Grey, Elliott Sharp, Michael Gordon, Bang on a Can, Engine27, Harvestworks, and LEMUR, and is the director of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra for its 2007 season. He is a co-author of Jitter, a software suite developed by Cycling’74 for real-time manipulation of matrix data. His music (with or without his band, the Freight Elevator Quartet), is available on Caipirinha/Sire, Cycling’74, and Cantaloupe music, and his artwork is represented by bitforms gallery in New York City.
J. Brendan Adamson: Brendan Adamson’s compositions and interactive works are informed by the superhuman performance requirements of works by Conlon Nancarrow and others, but employ recently developed capabilities of such robotic instruments as modern self-playing pianos, recent automated organs, and musical robots created by LEMUR. As an undergraduate student, Brendan presented his “impressive compositions” (The New York Times) at Juilliard’s first ever all-robot-performed concert, RoboRecital. In addition to numerous performances in the United States, his music has been performed by robots at international festivals around the world, including those in Belgium, Poland, Lithuania, Mexico, and Japan. Brendan holds a Bachelor’s degree in music composition from the Juilliard School. A native of West Palm Beach, Florida, past teachers include Nils Vigeland, Christopher Rouse, Mari Kimura, and Milton Babbitt.
Robosonic Eclectic is presented in collaboration with Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center. Works by George Lewis and Morton Subotnick are commissioned by LEMUR and Harvestworks with support from the Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production (MAP) Fund.
LEMUR is supported by generous grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation and Arts International. See http://lemurbots.org for more information.
For more information, contact info@lemurbots.org. For press information, contact Gayle Snible at gayle[at]lemurbots.org.
ALSO DON’T FORGET! TRANZDUCER.004 Friday, April 27th 8-11 pm
This month’s acts
* R. Luke DuBois and friend(s): Local new media celeb + >= 1 special guest(s)
* Marek Choloniewski: Krazy sensor music from Krakow
* Ellis & Aguilar Duo: Bass, percussion and electronics
LEMURplex: 461 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn, Between 9th & 10th Sts. $5
TRANZDUCER is LEMUR’s music, art and performance series hosted by Eric Singer, Jamie Allen and Tristan Perich.
Originally from Networked Music Review by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 27, 2007, 1:20PM
Hairy Displays
When it comes to displays you’ve got LCDs, LEDs, and OLEDs; now make way for Hairy-Ds.
Electronics giant Philips has filed a patent for an as-yet-unnamed “display fabric” that operates by controlling hairs. Each pixel is made of fabric of a certain color, and embedded with hairs of a different color. When the hairs lay flat, all you see is their color; apply an electrostatic charge and the hairs stand up, revealing the color of the fabric beneath.
The initial applications are forecasted to be clothing with changeable displays on them, as there doesn’t seem to be any use in having furry flatpanels. So we can continue to clean our laptop screens with electrostatic rags rather than, say, Pantene Pro-V.
[Via Oh Gizmo]
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Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Apr 24, 2007, 11:06AM
Satis-fying Design
Japanese toilet manufacturer Inax has just released their 2007 Satis Asteo Washlet toilet, which is a good example of how toilet design seems to be taken more seriously in Japan than elsewhere.
Some features:
A) The toilet has an SD card, pre-loaded with Bach, Chopin and Mendelsohn. Once you show up to take care of business, a sensor activates the tunes, either to relax you or to prevent houseguests in your thin-walled Japanese apartment from hearing anything other than Bach, Chopin or Mendelsohn.
B) The smoothly-designed exterior of the basin is easy to clean, absent of the dust- and grime-collecting nooks and crannies present in many Western toilets.
C) Another sensor figures out whether you’re going to need the seat up or down (crikey, would love to know how this one works) and motorizes it into the appropriate position. After you leave, it automatically places the seat in the down position if it was up, preventing countless marital spats.
D) A nightlight in the bowl helps guide you during those 2am emergencies, though this feature may not be so desirable if you’ve had too much tequila and are making that other use of the toilet.
The (somewhat poorly Google-translated) webpage is here.
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Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Apr 24, 2007, 11:49AM
Chris Conte’s biomechanical sculptures
Chris Conte, born in Norway and raised in New York, has recently begun to offer his unique collection of biomechanical sculptures for sale. It’s no surprise that he’s now represented by the same agent as one of his earliest influences, H.R. Giger. Aside from pursuing these cyber-fantastical creations, Conte harnesses his affinity for sculpture, medical-science, and biomechanics to develop and make prosthetic limbs for amputees. (Battery-powered microbotic insect shown above.)
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Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Apr 18, 2007, 9:50AM
“The Robots Are Coming!”
Yesterday i visited The Robots are Coming! People - Machines - Communication at the Museum for Communication in Berlin.
The exhibition traces the history of communication between humans and machines. All the types of robots you can think of are there: industrial robots, robots used in hospitals or for advertising purposes in the 1950s, made by artists, starring in music videos, toys, … New ones and ancestors: from 18th century musical automats, tea serving dolls from the Karakuri tradition, sketches by Bauhaus-related artists and designers to Tomy Omnibot, some of the robots that have grabbed the headlines over the past few years.
Three retro-future robots called Enter, Do Something and OK (my rough translation) are greeting visitors in the lobby of the museum. The first one, detects the legs of anyone approaching it and greets him or her, the second one talks like a little kid and spends its time following a big gym ball and i couldn’t understand what the third one was about (not able to grasp what the museum guards were trying to explain me.) Kind of fun but their cuteness is a bit too cliché.
The biggest stars of the show, in no particular order:
- Sabor, a big robot (237 cm high, 270 kg) made in the 50s in Switzerland and inspired by Karel Capek’s play R. U. R. (1920). It was able to smoke, move its arms and legs and speak with the help of an integrated phonograph to flirt with ladies.
A previous version of Sabor in 1945 and robot jockey
- the robot jockey KMEL, developed by Swiss company K-Team to replace its practice of using children as camel jockeys in the United Arab Emirates. The mechanical jockey gets orders from the instructor via a remote control system fixed on the back of the camel. The robots wear sunglasses, hats, racing silks, and they are sprayed with traditional perfumes used with human jockeys (via).
- the Novag Robot Adversary (1982) that plays chess with its mechanical arm, the first one available for sale to the public.
- a robotic arm that seems to be dancing, holding a piece of car in its hand. The robot is currently used to assemble Mercedes-Benz S-Class vehicles.
- climbing robots, crab robots, domestic humanoids, kinetic marionettes, and toys (loads of those).
Assembly robot and Toys produced between 1972 and 1997
Robots from the art scene:
Screenshot from “All Is Full Of Love”
- an extremely beautiful android from the video that Chris Cunningham shot for Björk’s All Is Full Of Love (1999.)
- Maria, the sexy and cruel fembot from Fritz Lang’s 1927 movie Metropolis.
- German artist Frank Fietzek was showing two works. The Self-running shoes he created together with Sven Ehamnn. Made for the exhibition “sneakers etc.” the pair of trainers could be remote-controlled by visitors. His second piece in the show is Watschendiskurs, a pair of robots that slap each other while arguing about language theory.
I’m not sure that bathing the exhibition in blue light is such a great idea. It gives a feeling of un-reality when the robots are indeed a reality. But the show was a very nice surprise. There isn’t much coverage of it in the press so i wasn’t expecting to discover such a fantastic collection. All explanations are in german which was a bit frustrating.
The exhibition runs until September 2 but there’s only a few days left to discover Les Robots-Music. Apparently the story starts during World War II when Edouard Diomgar, a French engineer imprisoned in a German camp, was killing time by fantasizing about an orchestra made of robots playing real instruments. After the war the 3 robots he built, Oskar, Ernest and Anatole, took the stage. They can play up to 500 tunes. The current version has been improved thanks to the latest tech developments but their clunkiness and bal musette songs are most charming.
My images on flickr. Set of images of the robots in Der Spiegel. Image at the top from Galicia Hoxe.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 14, 2007, 1:04AM
A look back at Kinnernet 2007
A few weeks ago, Rafael Mizrahi told me about the 4th Kinnernet, a hyper-geek event organized each year on the southern shores of the Sea of Galilee (Kinneret Lake) in northern Israel. I checked out the website and started bombarding Rafael with questions “What’s this robots?” “And that vehicle?” “How about this gaming arcade?” Here’s a few notes from our conversation:
Computer Crash Course and Game Rider
Set up in cooperation with Hubert Burda Media, creators of DLD conference, and following Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, KinnerNet intvited about 150 technology addicts and creative people to gather informally and discuss topics and concepts such as software development, internet culture, social networks, web services, Wi-Fi, open source, cellular services, computer games, interactive TV, VOIP, technological trends, gadgets, security, etc. The general purpose is to share thoughts, work-in-progress, show off the latest tech toys and hardware hacks, and tackle challenging problems. The camp is a closed and private event and participating to it means contributing.
Rafael defines himself as an “artificial vision explorer” at Feng-GUI lab (which developed the ViewFinder, an algorithm that simulates the human eyes and brain and what would be the gaze path of the eye movements while being exposed to visuals. Similar algorithms are embedded into robots) and a member of GarageGeeks (which looks like “crazy projects paradise”.)
As part of the Robot Extravaganza of KinnerNet 2007 camp, he presented the GuitarHeroNoid which he built together with Tal Chalozin. The full-scale humanoid autonomously plays the Sony PlayStation game Guitar Hero II (video of GuitarHeroNoid playing the song Woman by Wolfmother).
Can you tell us more about the robot that plays the PlayStation game “Guitar Hero”? How does it work and play?
At the game, each song is presented on a set of five columns, resembling a real guitar fret board, that scroll constantly towards the player. The five columns correspond to the five fret buttons and appropriately colored notes appear in these columns.
We connected the PlayStation video output using a capture device into a computer and by live video streaming filter capture the video frames as images. Each image is being processed and the detected notes are sent through the parallel output or through network cable directly into the robot. This distributed architecture is also used by a robotics bio-technology called Remote Surgery 
and actually this distribution saved us when my parallel output was burned by an electric shock coming back from the robot solenoids, and we separated the process into two laptops.
Tal built computer-controlled, solenoids fingers that matched the fret board and strings in the game. Getting the fingers to press the fret buttons and hit the strum correctly was the hard part.
Tal took a storeroom mannequin and positioned the arms to hold the guitar. But the arms couldn’t be put in the right position, so he had to break and glue them to hold the guitar right. All the robot wiring is inside the mannequin ending at a control panel on the back of its neck.
This first public demonstration of GuitarHeroNoid received a rock star ovation from the ultra-geek audience. We also prepared a multiplayer mode, so you can play against the robot. Pushing the envelope higher, maybe next year we will build a robot that plays the game “dance dance revolution” (known as Dancing Stage in Europe).
Now how about “Real Pacman”?
The Real Pac Man (Tal Chalozin, Niv Efron) main idea was to build some old school tech symbol using as much nowadays-technologies as we can find. Right away we knew that we want a large scale game that will give the feeling of the “PacMan come to life…”
The game board made of a projector mounted on a stand, projecting a 15-square-meters game board on the floor. The PacMan was a wireless Pac-look-a-like robot which “drives” over a game board, equipped by RFID reader, Bluetooth transceiver controlled by ATMEL microcontroller, riding on a game board marked with RFID tags.
At the button of the PacMan there is an RFID reader that reads the tag location and sends it back to the game “engine”. The game engine is a java game we hacked, running on a laptop computer.
The result is that you are playing with a completely realistic PacMan over a full virtual game board, but they communicate as if they are one.
To make it more useless tech powered, we’ve written a J2ME application running on a cellular phone for controlling the PacMan. So, instead of playing with the laptop keyboard, you play the game on your cell, which sends via Bluetooth the control commands.
The next step is to make it a multiplayer, PacMan and ghosts…
Pac Man does not get anymore realistic than that!
All around the room were screens and gaming consoles and a hydraulic driving simulator, so you could just sit down and rumble. At the center of the gaming room there were two home made arcade tables, one crafted by Davidi Silberstein and the other by Amit Jurgenson, both musicians, handy-men and old-school gamers.
Arcade Machine Quest and Amit’s Arcade Machine
And the hydraulic driving simulator?
Power tool drag racing took place inside a large and crowded tent. Crossing the middle of the tent, were two long wooden strip tracks in which the racers ran, dragging their electricity cables behind them. The race judges where Michael Shiloh, co-founder of MakingThings and an annual participant of drag racing, World class notorious hacker Pablos Holman who breaks and builds new technologies and Eyal Gever with the “from a designer perspective” opinion.
Image on the right: Vladimir’s Warm vs. Shy Vardi’s Spider (photo: Yaniv Golan)
Of course, the fastest racers were the ones Michael and Pablos brought. Michael had Jim Mason’s blazing fast “monorail” that runs as a monorail train on top of one of the sides of the track, and Pablos had borrowed an “Old Killdoggie” model racer, which is a modified grinder with inline-skate wheels. But getting first to the end of the track is not the goal of such a race.
At least half of the races were built by Yedidya (Didi) Vardi and his crew. Didi, a junk collector, designer of hands-on science models and screws-and-bolts seller. On Didi’s team were Shy Vardi, Vladimir Zviagintsev an aircraft engineer, who built the kites that were raised to thousands of feet in height, and Shlomo Abayoff.
Babylon Tower Racer was built by the GarageGeeks Zvika Netter, Yuval Tal, Ohad Pressman, Gil Hirsch and Tal Chalozin. A laptop sitting on a wagon with electric lawnmower wheels, motivated to move forward by SMS sent by the audience to Yuval’s phone number. Each time an SMS arrived, the light blob was blinked the message in morse code, and a Text-to-Speech algorithm announced the message using the racer’s speakers.
More racers such as the bottle Xylophone, playing on bottles set at the sides of the track, containing various amount of water for different tones. A CleanTech racer that needed no electricity but the moments of falling parts, Vacuuming Hovercraft, Skateboard Ventilator, and Parking, which actually did park most of the time and didn’t finish the race.
Crocodile “rocket” Handy by Naama, Achi and Yariv
KinnerNet looks like a hell of fun. Why is the number of participants limited to 150?
Are there like-minded events in the country during the rest of the year?
KinnerNet is a a lot of fun and in order to participate, you have to contribute and not act as a “camp potato”. I guess that the number is limited because only super geeks are invited. Since there are many people who wish to share and expand their connections, forks of miscellaneous camps and events are being formed. For example, GeekCon, EureKamp, and even us, the GarageGeeks are hosting (images) content evenings, barbeques and Gaming Lan Parties (images.)
I saw on the programme that there was some place dedicated to digital art? What happened there? Any good work you’d like to highlight?
I think digital art was everywhere. In the evening we all gathered in the dining room and watched videos prepared by participants. Michal Levy, for example, a saxophonist and graphic designer, presented a beautiful visual interpretation that she made for John Coltrane’s Giant Steps.
We were asked to bring from home any junk we don’t need anymore and Hanoch Piven hosted a face making workshop that was one of the most popular happenings. Hanoch has been making collages with objects - mainly illustrations of faces for magazines and newspapers since 1992.
The GraffitiPrinter
Ariel Schlesinger, presented his GraffitiPrinter, a handheld printer, feed from punch card that translates to spray writing on the wall.
Inside a large room, Ezri Tarazi along with the creative industrial designers Maayan Hagar and Yasmin Yotam, and anyone who wished to help, built a chain reaction sculpture called a machine that does something that does something.
Next to that sculpture, and the Superman Simulator, Didi Vardi presented his Vibrating Laser Balls Organ, a 400 pound golf-ball-and-aluminum Stradivarius, a wonderful, real musical instrument inspired by the Animusic’s virtual Pipe Dream. (video)
I’m also very curious about the Cooking Madness event. Was there anything edible there? What does “Cotton Candy with ambient touch” taste like for example?
Cooking Madness was more than edible all right. As you cannot be in all of the activities, I didn’t get the chance to taste that Fluffy Clouds Cotton Candy. But I ate two pieces from Tal’s mother’s terrific passion fruit cheese cake, which was introduced by 3 Powerpoint slides at the camp’s first gathering. Most of the time I stood next to Yuval Tal who prepared the Extra alcoholic chocolate drink, and verified the quality of the cocktail.
At night, things were getting weirder, people juggling, geeks playing arcades or fighting each other with light sabres, and Vladimir, inspired by The Burning Man Project, was riding a bicycle while dragging another bicycle with a burning doll, which was created earlier by Didi’s team.
I’d like to finish by send a enormous thanks and hugs to anyone who helped in the great 2007 KinnerNet event and also thank Yaniv Golan and Alex Sirota for the photos.
Thanks Rafael!
A last tip from Rafael: Gil Rimon and Lior Katz’s Supermarket 2.0 parody (video.)
More images at Flickr tag KinnerNet2007. Photo of GuitarHeroNoid by Yaniv Golan. More images.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Apr 7, 2007, 8:10AM
Interview with Anthony Dunne
Recently i stumbled upon a survey in some posh English art magazine. The journalist was asking readers whether they had already travelled only to see an exhibition in a foreign country. As you can guess i ticked the box “Yes, at least once a year.” If there had been a question asking “Have you ever travelled just to see one single piece in an exhibition?” I would have answered “Yes, i did that once.” It was in 2005, i took the plane to Paris just to see one work in the exhibition D.Day Modern Day Design at the Centre Pompidou. It was Fiona Raby and Tony Dunne’s Evidence Dolls. The dolls are hypothetical products that could be used by single women to store DNA samples from potential partners, gaining thus an increased sense of control in the dating game. Any reason to go to Paris is always welcome anyway.
If you follow the blog, you must be familiar with the work, and writing of Dunne & Raby.
Dunne is the Head of Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London. As demonstrated during the recent Work in Progress Show of Design Interactions students, the focus of the department is shifting. While electronics and computing remain essential elements of the course, his students are also exploring how design can connect with other technologies, such as biotechnology and nanotechnology. The result is a wide range of projects, often speculative and critical, which aim to raise the debate on the human consequences of different technological futures.
I actually first thought this interview for World Changing (where it’s been posted… with a less lazy introduction) and i realize now that if i had prepared the piece for wmmna, the questions would have been slightly different. But mister Dunne is a busy man, i couldn’t ask him to face two interviews, could i?
Placebo: The Electro-draught Excluder and the Nipple Chair
Your works express the belief that design shouldn’t just be used to turn technology into something eye-pleasing, sexy and easy to use. What other role should design play then?
It could make us think and encourage us to ask more from industry! There is no need to rush into the future frantically styling up new technology and getting it to market as fast as we can. We need to reflect a bit more and ask some questions, I know this is completely at odds with the industrial system we have today, but I think as a profession we could take on more social responsibility and use some of our time, resources and know-how to explore alternative ideas about everyday life to those put forward by industry.
I think there is a real need for design to address the public as well as industry, and to explore new ways of getting discussions going about what people really want and how industry can help us achieve it, rather than the other way around.
Teddy blood bag and Meat eating products
Your installation about future energy sources at the Science Museum in London is extremely surprising. The scenarios you picture there are deeply grounded in scientific research, yet they are miles away from our dreams of solar-powered cars and hydrogen-based cities: “poo” is envisioned as a resource, a radio is fuelled by blood kept in cute teddy-shaped pouches, and churches, school, even families are developing their own energy brand. Why didn’t you follow the trend and show more positive and bright visions of the future?
The exhibit is aimed at children between the ages of 7 and 12. Everywhere they look they will see images showing how bright our technological future will be once we embrace new energy sources like Hydrogen. But things are not so simple, with every new technology there are of course other consequences — economic, cultural and ethical. With this project we wanted to encourage children to think about the implications of 3 different technologies, all real, but some more likely to happen than others. The first is Hydrogen, here we wanted to deal with economics by portraying a scenario children could relate to — having to produce a certain amount of hydrogen in order to get their pocket money. Human Poo as energy was about a major cultural shift where something once thought of as dirty would become valuable, so people would want to keep it, disconnect themselves from the sewage system and even offer it as a gift. And with the blood scenario, we wanted to show that often, reality is stranger than fiction, there is a growing area of research looking at how microbial fuel cells can be used to make self-sufficient robots and other products; pacemakers that run on the blood in our own bodies for example. In this case we wanted children to think about ethics: where would the blood come from? Of course we slightly exaggerated everything to make them more engaging.
Why do you think that biotechnology, synthetic biology or nanotechnology, like electronics, are areas in which design should play a role?
All of these technologies, separately, and in combination, are going to have a huge impact on our lives in the near future. I think it’s important that designers, start thinking about how to get involved. It’s not just about new skills or a new medium, but very different ways of thinking. What does it mean to design living or semi-living materials and products? It’s important too that design, with its powerful visualisation skills, makes abstract concepts tangible and discussable. It can help us debate different futures before they happen. Otherwise the ‘future’ is just going to happen to us and the products and services we get will be driven by economic and technological factors rather than human needs, let alone desires.
I think it would be a great shame if designers stayed on the margins while these technologies begin to shape the world around us. The time it takes for science to turn into technology and then products is speeding up. There is no comparison with the trajectory electronics took so we need to start getting involved now and exploring what impact these new technologies will have on our lives.
Interaction Design grew out of the meeting of digital and cultural worlds and the need to make computers more useable, it will be interesting to see what other forms of design will emerge over the coming years.
Can you give us one example of a student(s)’ project that best represent the “design for debate” approach?
I think the best example has to be Tobie Kerridge and Nikki Stott’s Biojewellery, partly because it has evolved so much over the last 3 years. They started it in response to the first bio brief we set at the RCA in 2003. Later, with bioengineer Ian Thompson, they followed it through to a really impressive level. I particularly like some of the documents they produced on the way exploring the ethics of the project and whether or not it would be OK to operate on someone for basically poetic reasons. The project has generated debate and discussion throughout its life at all levels — aesthetics, practicalities, business, design, methodology … I don’t think all projects need to reach this level of resolution to be successful, but it’s a good example of what’s possible.
Test samples and Previous prototype of a ring using a combination of cow marrow-bone and etched silver
Two years ago, you showed Evidence Dolls at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The plastic objects were created to provoke discussion amongst a group of single women about the impact of genetic technology on their lifestyle. Can you tell us more about that project?
What was the impetus for this project?
Valerie Guillaume, a curator at the Pompidou Centre was very keen to have something about critical design in an exhibition she was curating so she commissioned the project. We had already sketched out the idea in BioLand and we thought this was a nice opportunity to take the idea further and also explore how it could be used to produce some new insights.
In the projects we ran with students about biotech, there would always be something to help men avoid leaving DNA behind so that they wouldn’t be implicated in future paternity cases. We, well Fiona, thought the woman’s perspective should be represented too. We were inspired by the story of a famous English actress who hired a detective to rummage through an ex-lover’s bin looking for material that could be analysed for DNA and used to prove he was the father of her baby. The detective found some dental floss and it provided enough DNA to prove he was the father. Fiona thought this process should be made a little easier. The doll is effectively a storage device for DNA from a woman’s various lovers. It would be collected in the form of toenail clippings, hair and other bodily materials. Later, if necessary, they could be analysed. The material is stored in a S,M or L penis drawer. The dolls can be personalised to represent each lover. For the exhibition we worked with ÅBÄKE who interpreted the interview transcripts through drawings on each doll. the interviews with the women were included in the exhibition.
And how did the women understand, react to and welcome this unconventional project?
This was all done behind closed doors. As you can imagine, the conversations were quite intimate as each woman spoke candidly about her past lovers. But most of the women reacted to it as something they could imagine using, I found this strange to believe myself, but that was the reaction. The project was not about whether they would want or even use one, it was more about finding a way to explore the impact a new technological possibility might have on ideas of love, romance and dating.
Anxious Times: Hideaway Furniture, Huggable Atomic Mushroom
You’re now Head of the department of Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in London. A year ago, the department was still called Interaction Design. What motivated such change?
The name interaction design is beginning to mean something quite specialised and focussed on designing interfaces for electronic and digital products and systems. This is probably a very good thing if you are trying to establish a discipline or a group within a company, but it’s not so good if you are interested in pushing boundaries and exploring new ways designers can make technology relevant and meaningful to everyday life. Designing better interfaces is one way of doing this but not the only way.
I think originally, the interesting thing about interaction design was the emphasis on designing interactions rather than things. We changed the name of the department around to emphasise this. But by changing the name we also hoped to decouple interaction design as a design approach, from purely digital and electronic technologies, and to allow it to continue to mutate and evolve in relation to design challenges created by a whole range of other technologies like bio- and nanotech as well as new social and cultural developments.
Our intention is to broaden the technological focus of the department so that new design contexts, methods and roles can begin to emerge, and possibly, even provide new perspectives on how we design interfaces for digital technologies.
To work in such and open space can be quite challenging and students need to have a very strong sense of self, but we think that ultimately, this will prepare designers for working at the cutting edge of a very fluid and exciting area of design.
Your students work closely with people outside the College, some of them are scientists. Or do these scientists see this “intrusion” of designers into their own sphere of research?
This is something we are still evolving. The scientists we have met so far are all dedicated to engaging with people outside science and have been very enthusiastic about student work. I’m sure there are scientists who would see us as intruders, but I doubt we will meet them very often, I think we are moving in different circles and networks.
Which (work) future do you see for students who want to fully engage in “design for debate”?
Often, when I give a lecture and show work from the design for debate projects, designers find it a bit too weird and extreme or try to label it as art rather than design (to defuse it), but always, there are people in the audience who come up afterwards to talk about commercial possibilities and see it simply for what it is, a way of getting a discussion going about the impact technology might have on everyday life by imagining positive and negative future scenarios.
The Design for Debate project is only one of 6 we run in first year each exploring different design approaches, roles and contexts but it produces some of the most striking results. I think for most students it’s an interesting learning experience, but I’m not sure how many of them plan on taking this approach further when they graduate. For those who do, I think there are several possible directions. The most natural is the exhibition route, showing in various venues and crossing between art and design worlds. But other possibilities are emerging.
Last summer, two of our students did internships in the Department of Trade and Industry’s Foresight Group working with scientists and civil servants on a project about obesity. The students enjoyed it and the DTI wants more this year. So there also seems to be a place in organisations, government or otherwise, for this kind of design. Companies like Philips are very interesting, they have a small group looking at the cross over between biological and electronic systems in relation to new products and interfaces, and I could see possibilities there which I guess are more research orientated. They do projects called probes which are intended to provoke and open up new possibilities, design for debate projects would prepare students well for this role. And then there are all the yet to be discovered possibilities.
ARK-INC installation at the 2006 RCA Summer Show
Last year, at the RCA Summer show, one of your students presented a project that i liked a lot, it was called Ark Inc. Jon Ardern looked at our ineffectual attempts to live a truly sustainable life. His project suggested that we adapt our life style to life “after the crash”, to the time when our actions have exhausted the resources of the Earth upon which we depend. Can you comment on this particular project?
Only that I really like it. I think it’s very interesting to design organisations as well as systems and services and Jon worked hard to avoid the usual forms of ‘evidence’ these projects can generate. One thing we struggle with is how to communicate work like this in a show with 200 other designers. Having said that, you found it and enjoyed and I know many others who did too, but it would be good to reach a wider audience with work like Jon’s. We have two students this year building on Jon’s approach one is looking at “11 solutions to an impending apocalypse“, and the other is designing communication and other systems for a group of extreme eco-guerillas that places the survival of the planet above all else.
What are you working on now?
Well the new course is taking up a lot of my time, but besides that we are working on a few new things. We did a small project for an exhibition at the Science Museum about spying which we enjoyed working on, Noam Toran, Troika, and Onkar Kular did some work for it too.
We’re working on a collection of electronic prototype products with Michael Anastassiades that extends the Fragile Personalities project into the electronic realm for an exhibition in October, and we’ve just finished some work for an exhibition at z33 in Hasselt, called Designing Critical Design that’s just opened. We are showing with two designers whose work we really like, Marti Guixe and Jurgen Bey. It consists mainly of existing work but the curators have commissioned some new work as well which I will say a little about as we really enjoyed doing it.
After a trip to Tokyo in November we became very interested in Robots and developed some conceptual products for the show, as well as a video with Noam Toran and some sounds with Scanner.
All the robots (Image by Per Tingleff)
Robots are destined to play a more significant part in our daily lives over the coming years. But how will we interact with them? What kind of new interdependencies and relationships might emerge? The objects we developed are meant to spark a discussion about how we’d like our robots to relate to us: subservient, intimate, dependent, equal? We presented 4 ideas.
Robot 1: This one is very independent. It lives in its own world getting on with its work. We don’t really need to know what it does as long as it does it well. It could be running the computers that manage our home. It has one quirk; it needs to avoid strong electromagnetic fields as these might cause it to malfunction. Every time a TV or radio is switched on, or a mobile phone is activated it moves itself to the electromagnetically quietest part of the room. As it is ring shaped, the owner could, if they liked, place their chair in its centre, or stand there and enjoy the fact that this is a good space to be in.
Robot 2: In the future products/robots might not be designed for specific tasks or jobs. Instead they might be given jobs based on behaviours and qualities that emerge over time. This robot is very nervous, so nervous in fact, that as soon as someone enters a room it turns to face them and analyses them with its many eyes. If the person approaches too close it becomes extremely agitated and even hysterical. Home security might be a good use of this robot’s neurosis.
Robot 3 and Robot 4
Robot 3: More and more of our data, even our most personal and secret information, will be stored on digital databases. How do we ensure that only we can access it? This robot is a sentinel, it uses retinal scanning technology to decide who accesses our data. In films iris scanning is always based on a quick glance. This robot demands that you stare into its eyes for a long time, it needs to be sure it is you.
Robot 4: This one is very needy. Although extremely smart it is trapped in an underdeveloped body and depends on its owner to move it about. Originally, manufacturers would have made robots speak human languages, but over time they will evolve their own language. You can still hear human traces in its voice.
During this project we also became very interested in microbial fuel cells that use bacteria to break down ‘food’ such as slugs, meat, rotten apples and flies. In the future, some robots will have stomachs. How will the way we interact with them be affected when we have to feed them rather than recharge them?
And finally, I think our big interest right now is exploring how a critical design approach can be applied to future scenarios and emerging technologies in relation to public engagement and debate, this work is more theoretical and ongoing, and hopefully, will eventually result in a new book.
Many thanks for your time, Tony!
You’re welcome, and thank you for your questions.
Images from the websites of Raby & Dunne, Design Interactions, Jon Ardern, pictures of the robots by Per Tingleff.
Look out for their books:
Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects by Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne (UK - USA)
And the recent re-edition of Anthony Dunne’s Hertzian Tales - Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Mar 12, 2007, 6:09AM
Senspectra
Another project from the very clever fellows at MITs Tangible Media group. Senspectra is a computationally augmented physical modeling toolkit designed for sensing and visualization of structural strain. The system functions as a distributed sensor network consisting of nodes, embedded with computational capabilities and a full spectrum LED, which communicate to neighbor nodes to determine a network topology through a system of flexible joints. While the Senspectra infrastructure provides a flexible modular sensor network platform, its primary application derives from the need to couple physical modeling techniques utilized in the architecture and industrial design disciplines with systems for structural engineering analysis, offering an intuitive approach for physical real-time finite element analysis. Utilizing direct manipulation augmented with visual feedback, the system gives users valuable insights on the global behavior of a constructed system defined as a network of discrete elements.
Originally
from Interactive Architecture dot Org
by
reBlogged
by michael
on Dec 5, 2006, 11:27PM
Make’s open source gift guide
Our pals over at MAKE magazine have put together a fabulous list of open source gifts for geeks that encourage tinkering, riffing, remixing, building and tweaking:
There are hundreds of gift guides this holiday season filled with junk you can buy - but a lot of time you actually don’t own it, you can’t improve upon it, you can’t share it or make it better, you certainly can’t post the plans, schematics and source code either. We want to change that, we’ve put together our picks of interesting open source hardware projects, open source software, services and things that have the Maker-spirit of open source.
The list includes a DIY MP3 player, a wifi router running Linux, a high speed photography kit and even some open source beer (!). Make readers are adding to this one continuously, so be sure to add it to your holiday bookmarks.
Originally
from Lifehacker
reBlogged
by michael
on Nov 28, 2006, 12:00AM
