prosthetic knowledge
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Polaroid Cacher
Student project from Adrià Navarro and DI Shin turns an old Polaroid camera into desktop printer, designed to capture special moments in your online life - video embedded below:
Polaroid Cacher from Adrià Navarro on Vimeo.
The Polaroid Cacher is a camera that allows you to take traditional instant pictures of your digital experiences. It’s an ambient device, part physical and part digital, meant to address the fleeting nature of online interactions.
We believe that our daily online activity –conversations, discoveries, games– is as meaningful as our activity in the physical world and, as such, should be preserved the same way we try to capture every important moment in our life. Especially because most of this experiences will be soon forgotten, lost under layers of information, databases and outdated services.
Given the powerful association of instant photography with memories, people and nostalgia –rather than with photographic quality– we designed our camera as a fictional Polaroid product. One that captures digital media in a traditional analog format, as means to create tangible, durable mementos of our digital life.
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Distorter: Making of silkscreen
Short film documenting the process of making an Op Art screenprint designed with Processing code:
Distorter: Making of silkscreen from Sebastian Sikora on Vimeo.
Documentation of my recent project.
I had programmed custom distortion editor (in Processing) which I used to design silkscreen graphics.
More details: blog.sebastiansikora.pl/post/distorter -
im/materialising by Darren Harvey-Regan
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Studies in Broadcast Colour
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Out Of Print
Fun project creates computer-generated random headlines scrambled from news feeds which are then printed with traditional techniques and sent via Twitter:
The invention of the printing press is the finest example of how a shift in technology can change the way we communicate. In the 21st century, digital technology has become the defining force shaping society; changing the way we live, interact and consume information.
With the growth of digital media we are now faced with unprecedented levels of data. We find ourselves at a saturation point. By attempting to consume ever more, we end up understanding less. How do we make sense of all the information we consume and not get lost in the process? Through the use of traditional printing techniques we explore this question.
By using live online news feeds we are building a digital application that generates seemingly random headlines; these will then be printed using a custom-built letterpress. The prints will form a growing collection exhibited as part of the installation.
More about the project here
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Espresso Book Machine
Publishing system can create retail-quality printed books from file to bound copy in five minutes - video below:
The patented Espresso Book Machine® (EBM) makes a paperback book in minutes, at point of need. Through its EspressNet® digital catalog of content, books can be ordered online or onsite at bookstores, libraries, and non-bookstore retailers. Over seven million in-copyright and public-domain titles are available on the network. The technology is also ideal for self and custom publishing.
More about the machine can be found here
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Process Watch by Katja Novitskova
Digital print for one-day art show featuring a collage of infographic data of that day:
On June 27th 2012 I did Hotel Palenque, a curatorial project of Elise Lammer. Hotel Palenque is about inviting an artist to do a one-day show that proposes two conditions: making an A0 print, and deleting the files used to make it.
Process Watch is a digital collage inframed in a outdoor poster display with two key-locks. Collage was made a few hours before the opening out of several types of real-time data from the day of the exhibition: weather reports from various cities around the world, currency exchange rates, stock exchange statistics, commodity prices, satellite footage, Moon phase and location, etc. The data gathered in the form of screenshots from the internet was then assembled in Photoshop. Fundamentally unique occurence of particular weather and economic conditions of the day were further intensified by freehand digital tool use. The print is locked in a frame and will exist as a singular piece - a document to the reality of the moment and a product of the conditions that led to it.
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Beautiful Failures
Cunicode examines the beauty in errors and accidents of objects created with a 3D printer:
On the path to get the perfect 3D-Print, many meters of filament get piled up as discarded disappointments,
as bastard objects that never were,
as unborn half-things…… and they are beautiful …
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Layar Creator
Layar release a simplified augmented reality editing service to bring digital connectivity to print media.
Layar, the world’s leading mobile augmented reality (AR) provider, today announced the launch of the Layar Creator, a self-service web application for activating print pages with digital content. By simplifying and demystifying previously complex AR technology, the Layar Creator makes it quick and easy to bring once static pages to life with videos, links and “Buy” buttons that readers can view with their smartphone.
In a matter of seconds, anyone can upload images or PDFs, drag-and-drop any of a number of digital buttons onto the pages and publish them on the Layar platform. When readers view activated pages with the Layar app, these buttons appear on top of the page, enabling deeper engagement and direct commercial opportunities as the printed page becomes a point-of-sale.
You can find out more about the service here
It is worth noting that, despite the obvious focus on mainstream high-circulation magazines, there is a Pro-Publishing model as well as an Ad-Supported one which could lead to some creativity to the lower circulation models, such as zines, and possibility other areas such as stickers, paintings, street art etc …
I got in contact via Twitter about a couple of things - first, to have AR video, you’ll need a high-end mobile to have it work properly within the camera view (otherwise it will open in a separate window), iPhone 4(S) or dual-core Android at the minimum. Secondly, it doesn’t support animated GIFs (which would have been great), although you could position a link button to a GIF file.
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ARTchipel: Christiane Baumgartner
Art blog ARTchipel has been covering an interesting artist today whose works are woodblock prints based on video stills, retaining the scan-line effect:
Christiane Baumgartner’s work deals with the convergence of speed and standstill. Her choosen format is monumental monochrome woodcut taken from her own video stills. She combines the earliest and the latest reproduction processes: woodcut and video. Speed and the passage of time are recurring themes throughout her work. The notion of ‘time’ is also embodied in her artistic process, which involves the lengthy and painstaking medium of handmade woodcut, with all its inaccuracies and mistakes.
You can see more of the blog’s coverage of the artist at ARTchipel here
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A record sleeve that isn’t a record sleeve
New Arem limited edition release is record sleeve packaging with handmade printed QR Code poster … with no physical record inside. From Creative Review:
The latest release from musician Stay+ comes in a record sleeve-size package that contains no music format whatsoever. Instead, the highly limited transparent acrylic sleeves contain a foldout, 50inch QR code screen print that leads the buyer to a download page online…
Each sleeve is made from 4mm transparent acrylic made to the same size and template as a standard 12” card record sleeve - even the fold over flaps.
Inside, the folded QR code insert is printed on specially manufactured newsprint, made to size.
Over at Arem’s website, you can see a video of how each piece of packaging was made:
More at Creative Review and Arem’s Website, as well as ordering a copy from Records Are My Pillow here
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Color Picker by Anders Clausen
Collection of large-scale prints made up of broken up Photoshop tools. Shown as part of the Broadway 1602 exhibition ‘YEAR OF COOPERATION’:
Made on a giant inexact industrial printer (it can turn turn greytones into yellow), and printed onto a form of upvc canvas that could be the hoarding that covered a Doges Palace in scale and durability, Anders Clausen’s ‘Color Picker’ works draw on computer software icons, desktop imagery, emoticons, found imagery and Photoshop toolbars in their variously ‘collaged’ and pristine arrangements. Back to Illich for a moment, and his conviction that he needs to find a framework for evaluating man’s relation to his tools, “Neither a dictatorial proletariat nor a leisure mass can escape the dominion of constantly expanding industrial tools.” And Debord’s earlier notion that being is replaced by ‘having’, which is then replaced by appearing. Clausen asserts a bold relationship with the myriad personal, leisure, business, creative, practical or emotional fragments and essential tools for navigating through the desktop, on which we build our avatars, and acknowledges that they come through pre-existing material, images and texts. Copied and doctored.
More examples of the work exhibited can be found at Contemporary Art Daily here
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Intricate Japanese Movable Type Sets
Dark Roasted Blend provides some history and great photos on the subject of early Japanese (and Asia) printing:
Craft letterpress companies are experiencing a revival in recent times, and nowhere it is more evident than in Japan. Most of you will be familiar with the ancient Chinese and Japanese art of woodblock printing, but masterpieces created with wood and metal movable type are somewhat lesser known, although they show craftsmanship and attention to detail similar to fine woodblock prints.
The first movable type and printing presses were invented in Asia, not Europe.
…but their development stalled because of the extreme complexity and sheer number of Chinese and Korean characters (the same problem that the Asian cultures faced with the transition to typewriters and the internet). We can thank the simplicity of Western alphabets for the rapid development and adoption of the printed word in Europe, which quickly lead to the Renaissance and further advances in culture and education.
It is a widespread misconception that Johannes Gutenberg created the first movable type system and the printing press, around 1450 A.D. It’s true, Gutenberg was the first to make his movable type from a certain alloy of lead, tin, and antimony (which was more efficient than iron, used in Asia) - but movable type itself was originally invented in China around 1040 A.D. by Bi Seng (during the Song Dynasty). The new system was badly needed to replace the labor-intensive woodblock printing technique, where a single wooden block was carved to represent a single page.More interesting information and great photos on the subject can be found at Dark Roasted Blend here
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Memory Beach by Ashley Anderson
In the words of the artist:
A series of digital collages about a heartbroken octopus who drives to the beach to forget about his girlfriend.
You can read more about the production of these prints at Ashley’s Press Start To Begin blog, buy a print at his Etsy Store, and follow him on his Tumblr blog.
