prosthetic knowledge

Hand Drawn Maze on A1 Paper Took 7 Years to Make

Via Spoon and Tamago:

Some people have hobbies. Other people are obsessive. But when the two cross paths, this is what you get. Japanese twitter user @Kya7y recently unearthed an incredibly detailed maze that her father created almost 30 years ago. When pressed for details, the father explained that he spent 7 years creating the map on A1 size paper, which is about 33 x 23 inches.

More Here

A Timeline of 20th Century Art and New Media, via Kyle McDonald

[Click for Hi Res version here]

QR Clock 

Tech project which displays the time as a QR Code in an LED matrix, put together by ch00ftech:

What the hell?

Right?  This is an idea I had at some point along my four day drive across the country.  QR codes are very popular for some reason.  Marketers insist that they’re useful and demand to put them in everything despite the fact that nobody uses them.

The real problem with QR codes is that they force people to use a machine to translate what could easily be human-readable information.  Rather than a QR code, why not just show the text “Chevy.com” or even better just the word “Chevy” because everyone knows how to google stuff?  Seriously, I’ve seen QR codes on highway billboard signs as if anyone is going to whip out their smartphone while they’re pulling 65.

So why a clock?  As I’ve said before, clocks have already sort of been perfected.  A digital wristwatch is probably the most convenient, accurate, and durable way to tell the time possible.  Any attempt to change the typical blue-light special wristwatch will only make it more expensive or harder to read.  This clock attempts to do both.

Also, this clock points out the ultimate irony of QR codes which is that they are a technological convenience that really isn’t convenient.  In order to read this clock, the user will require some sort of QR scanning device which is guaranteed to have a time-telling function built into it already.

So, that’s why I made it.  Hilarious, right?

You can find out more about how it was put together at ch00ftech’s blog here

Transits by Ursula Damm

Generative video uses footage of city viewpoints yet regains the traces of people and transport moving by - the effect is reminiscent of Marcel Dulchamp’s “Nude Decending a Staircase”. Embedded below is a segment from the film:

“transits” - generative video installation from resoutionable on Vimeo.

[Google Translate:]

Transit is a video installation that was produced for the exhibition place of sensing House of Electronic Arts Basel.

The installation uses static video recordings of Aeschenplatz in Basel to record traces of passersby on an urban transportation hub and make visible in their characteristics. , A newly developed software (Author: Martin Schneider) understands the entire video frame than neural feature map (Kohonen map). Each pixel of the video image is stored and subsequently using special algorithms “remembers” or processed. On the one hand we wanted long lingering elements into the picture enroll, on the other hand has this vision and its own dynamics: colors attract and movements pushing pixels in the detected direction.

The work is by Ursula Damm, and you can find more info at her site here

Experimental 3D Mapping of Cities with a Webcam, Sunlight, and Time 

Clever and inventive approach to large scale 3D modelling, using sunlight and shadow to calculate form (called ‘Heliocentric Stereo’) - from Austin Abrams:

In this work, we present a method to uncover shape from webcams “in the wild.” We present a variant of photometric stereo which uses the sun as a distant light source, so that lighting direction can be computed from known GPS and timestamps. We propose an iterative, non-linear optimization process that optimizes the error in reproducing all images from an extended time-lapse with an image formation model that accounts for ambient lighting, shadows, changing light color, dense surface normal maps, radiometric calibration, and exposure. Unlike many approaches to uncalibrated outdoor image analysis, this procedure is automatic, and we report quantitative results by comparing extracted surface normals to Google Earth 3D models. We evaluate this procedure on data from a varied set of scenes and emphasize the advantages of including imagery from many months.

More Here and at New Scientist Here

Social Network Clock

Time-based visualization of social network activity based on bitly data, by retronator:

Today’s random idea to create a webpage: the Social Network Clock!

A few weeks back bitly posted some interesting data that hints when people use different social networks. Today’s stupid idea for not playing Minecraft all day involved creating a CSS3 time display webpage that overlays current time over the graphs published by bitly.

Tumblr is apparently the party network for evenings and weekends so cheers to you guys!

Link

Shadow QR Code 

Promotional physical installation casts QR Code at specific time of day to encourage business during downtime. From Springwise:

Periodic lulls in business are a fact of life for most retailers, and we’ve already seen solutions including daily deals that are valid only during those quiet times. Recently, however, we came across a concept that takes such efforts even further. Specifically, Korean Emart recently placed 3D QR code sculptures throughout the city of Seoul that could only be scanned between noon and 1 pm each day — consumers who succeeded were rewarded with discounts at the store during those quiet shopping hours.

Dubbed “Sunny Sale,” Emart’s effort involved setting up a series of what it calls “shadow” QR codes that depend on peak sunlight for proper viewing and were scannable only between 12 and 1 pm each day. Successfully scanning a code took consumers to a dedicated home page with special offers including a coupon worth USD 12. Purchases could then be made via smartphone for delivery direct to the consumer’s door.

More info (and cheesy video) can be found at Springwise here

ioNoi

A blog that looks at various pieces of visual communication works from various times, and places items together with a resounding connection without commentary:

With this new layout of the blog, by focusing on the immediacy of images my goal is to convey the relationship between me and us, between things and their universe of reference. People and things are born from other people and other things.
Seeking connections - often unplanned and undeclared - helps pave the way to an approach to inclusive and cross-cutting knowledge. History does not unfold in separate compartments but is at once cause and effect.
New interpretative horizons are played out in the free comparison of references. 

You can check out this blog here

Photo Timeline

Using Google Images, enter a search term and a year to construct a visual timeline on anything.

Try it out here

Time by John Clang

A series of photographs taken at particular places in New York over a period of time, torn and reassembled:

A series that involves recording a location, to show the passing of time in a montage style. There is a sense of intimate intricacy of how time moves, and how people, albeit in a different time, are actually closer to one another and traveling in the same shared space. I’ve always been intrigued by the constant subtle changes in my urban environment. Every subtle shift affects my feelings and thoughts, hence my images respond acutely as a poetic reflection of myself in this environment. Working on this series, I explore how time moves in this seemingly static urban space. The people become the moving energy flowing through this space, marking the changes, forming the time. These images also explore my fascination that there are probably many time dimensions in this universe. We may have a ‘life’ that exists similarly on a different path, one minute before or after the one we’re living now. We merely just exist in this current dimension, and sometimes when time paths collide, we have déjà vu experience. (…close)

More examples (and other great photographic projects can be found at Cheng’s website here

In Transit by Diego Kuffer

Photographic collection of scenes depicting change and movement in a digital, glitchy style. Reminiscent of work covered in a previous post, Quantum Blink by Isabel M Martinez.

More of the collection can be found at Minimal Exposition and the artist’s portfolio site.

Generative Typography Experiments by Reza Ali

Using the Processing programming language, Reza has been testing code to manipulate and alter type through various means:

Over the past year I worked on several client projects and got a fulltime job (which I am no longer at), which kept me pretty busy. When I did get some time, I ended up experimenting with typography, color, simulations (particles, springs, and fluid), audio-input and simple rule based systems. These images are the results of half a year or so of coding, tinkering, tweaking, manipulating, and massaging algorithms for generative typography. Read more about these images and how these were created.After briefly experimenting with typography and dynamic systems in Nov. 2010, I started to experiment with color after being inspired by Paul Smith’s vibrant color palette. I believe in minimalism, and for a long time I used only monochromatic color palettes. I still believe in minimalism, but utilize color to make things pop and to give them a playful personality.

The full set of examples can be found at Reza’s blog here

Simple Tumblr Stats 

Statistics generator for Tumblr blogs created by Noodles and Beef.

Interesting to see what this tool delivers, but I’m sure the developer would agree that, while it could provide some interesting insights, it probably shouldn’t be considered an extensive and authoritative tool.

I had to create a screen capture above as there seems to be problems with the sharing function, and this took just over an hour to generate.

Also, on the ‘Notes on Posts Over Time’, graph, I don’t believe that it truly shows this, I think it is more of a case of posts arranged chronologically, with total notes.

Still, interesting to see what comes out of this, and the Tumblr crushes list at the bottom is more like the total likes of the older Tumblr system, as opposed to the current relative system (not a bad thing in itself).

You can try it out here, and read about it at Noodles and Beef’s post.

Split Time Café by Philippe Rahm

Architectural project that is designed not only considering space but also how the body responds to natural cycles of day and night:

“Split times café” is an architectural project for a café for the FOC Eybesfeld. It is given like a cellular division, from a time unique and single at the beginning, to a split in two parallel times, the night and the day, but both present at the same time. Actually, “Split times Café” gives the possibility of live in three temporalities: The first one is natural; the other two are artificial, physiologically produced. Furniture is drawn consequently, offering a variety of use and atmosphere, to choose freely. The project is thus a machine to cross the time, to pass instantly from the day to the night, to shift from the naturalness to the artificial in a fragment of second. Architecture is here literally the art of the construction of time.

The first temporality, taken in an envelope of clear glass, is, in real time, the time of the natural solar course. Classic furniture of a café is there, tables and chairs.

The second temporality is built with a yellow colored glass envelope, blocking the wavelengths of the light responsible for the fall of the melatonin in the body. It reproduces a true physiological night while being luminous. Furniture is here closer to a lounge and approaches the sofa to the bed.

The third temporality is defined by an envelope of blue glass of which wavelengths block the secretion of the melatonin in the body. It is thus a kind of perpetual day, for action, which becomes a bar, with high tables only, where customers stay upright for short stays.

Architecture becomes not only the design of the space but of the time too. To construct a night, to construct a day: it becomes challenging possibilities for the architectural design. “Split times café” is an architectural project splitting the time in three parallel spaces and customers could shift instantly from one moment of the day to an other.

More information and photos can be found at the designers website here