prosthetic knowledge

Neticones 

Online net art project can turn a webcam photo into a mosaic made from Facebook icons.

Try it out here

The Art Of Ken Knowlton

Artist who was working with alternative pixels and text art before it was fashionable. I’ve covered Ken Knowlton many times previously, but thanks to the Tumblr text-mode for, err, re-reminding me …

He has been making these images with various objects for years (from dominoes, sea shells to toy cars), with the examples above ranging from 1966 to 2003. Here, in his own words, is an explanation of his background, taken from a short piece “Mosaic Portraits: New Methods and Strategies”:

My main interest was computers, particularly their use in picture-making … The non-scientific, some say artistic, aspects of computer graphics arose for me via a sophomoric prank. Ed David, two levels up, was away for a while and the mice, one might say, played ever more freely. Leon Harmon stopped by to ask me for help with a brilliant idea: when Ed returns, one entire wall of his office will
be covered with a huge picture made of small electronic symbols for transistors, resistors and such. But overall, they will form a somewhat-hard-to-see picture of, guess what, a nude! And so the renowned Harmon-Knowlton nude was conceived, coaxed into being, and duly hung on Ed’s wall.

But the big version burst forth a while later at a press conference on Art and Technology in Robert Rauschenberg’s loft, and on the watershed date of October 11, 1967, it appeared atop the first page of the second section of the New York Times, which made not the slightest effort to conceal its birthplace. Billy Kluver claims that this was the first time ever that the Times printed a nude! The PR department huddled and decided, so it seems, that since she had appeared in the venerable Times, our nude was not frivolous inyour-
face pornography after all, but in-your-face Art. Their revised statement was: You may indeed distribute and display it, but be sure that you let people know that it was produced at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.
We did make similar pictures - of a gargoyle, of seagulls, of people sitting at computers - which have appeared here and there. But it was our Nude who would dolphin again and again into public view in dozens of books and magazines. Sometimes it is excused by a more dignified title, like Studies in Perception I; once the two of us were photographed in front of it, providing a scant two-piece cloak of modesty. Just recently I encountered it in Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine (1970) where, as last in a three-panel display, it demonstrates progress (or regress) in mechanization of the portrayal of woman.
That was the beginning for me of a fascination with large pictures made of small things, that has occupied my eyes, hands and mind ever since. It was also my first conscious buffeting by chaos: a mischievous butterfly had flapped, and a huge chunk of my career and persona veered onto a new course.

On the other hand, and again by chance, my debut as artist was postponed for several years. How so?
Because Art-and-Technology was the rage, and The Museum of Modern Art had a “Machine Show,” and the Brooklyn Museum and other places had similar parties, and in each case Leon and I submitted the Nude to demonstrate a collaboration between artist and techno-geek (or whatever). One of us had to be an artist. So
by the whim of a spin-launched coin, Leon became the artist and I remained a technologist (pretense aside, so did he). I did not understand until ten years later that I had lost the toss, since artists, I was learning, were the perceptive predictors, the daring, flamboyant and revered analysts of past, present and future, the grand but sly commentators on human joy and sorrow. (After another ten years, and exposure to a hundred artists, I learned that that notion was 90 percent humbug.)

Interesting to read how “… Art-and-Technology was the rage …”

You can read the rest of the essay here, and see more examples of Ken’s mosaic pixel work here

lido mar by studio RHE (via Design Boom)

New marina exquisitely designed:

studio RHE a london-based firm has recently completed ‘lido mar’, in tivat, montenegro. the new marina development is built on an former yugoslavian navy submarine dry dock at porto montenegro. the structure features a grand bronze sculpture which sits upon an 80 meter long infinity pool to reveal the detailed geometric mosaic below.

More photos and information here

Stockholm’s 8-bit subway station via Design You Trust

More Here

Photo-Mosaic created by Surveyor 3 from a lunar mission

How-To: Generate dice mosaics from image files (via Make Magazine)

[link] - thanks to sarahbadr for the tip

Design Walk 2010: Analog VS digital by tsevis

Part One

This is a mosaic illustration made in collaboration with my friends at the Indyvisual Design Collective. These good fellas asked me to play with them on the subject “analog VS digital”. They have been given this subject by Double Decker, curators of the Design Walk 2010.
The idea of Petros Voulgaris, Costas Vassilakis, Stavros Georgakopoulos, Christos Kourtoglou and Giorgos Chandrinos was to create a digital mosaic and then they would reconstruct it in an analog mode.
We chose to use the eyes from the poster of the Mathieu Kassovitz’s “La Heine” movie. My friends are thinking that the film is not only a great classic but it’s also expressing a period that our country is also living lately.
To provide a revolutionary response to this social mess we chose to use some leftist or military clichés like the star or the thunder but enrich them with floppies and scissors that are symbols of digital and analog creativity. The Black-Red-Yellow colors are not used only because we wanted to incorporate another cliché. These are the actual colors of the Indyvisuals’ working space. (I think this guys are supporting a yellow soccer team or something… :-))

Tsevis Visual Design

The work of Charis Tsevis, a graphic designer whose works have been included in Fortune and TIME.

Tsevis Visual Design site

Charis Tsevis Dripbook portfolio