With our attempts to cultivate nature, humankind causes the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and splendidly beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.
At ISEA 2010, the International Symposium on Electronic Arts, media artists and media researchers from all over the world present their work in Dortmund (Germany). This year, many projects focus on the relationship between man and nature and man and technology. An overview of contemporary artistic practices of NextNature at ISEA 2010.
Haroon Baig from Germany has figured out a way to key up the amount of 50+ Twitter addicts.
This progressive nostalgic cuckoo device displays new tweets from any twitter stream or search on the built-in display, “accompanied by the charming yet obtrusive call of a mechanical cuckoo popping out of the clock”.
Urban intervention, naughty boy-style! The public media interventionists of VR/Urban have designed a cool tool to intervene into next nature: the SMSlingshot. A wooden, embedded interaction device –equipped with an ultra-high frequency radio, a hacked Arduino board, laser and batteries – to shoot your own message directly onto a building or media facade. With some tucked away beamers, it works like magic. Reclaim the screens!
Hurray, the Next Nature tribe is growing! Today, we’ve welcomed our 2,000th friend on Facebook. And what better way is there to honour this person with a celebrational parade organised by our comrades from the Next Nature Twitter Tribe? IS Parade is a nice webtoy, but also a good illustration of how social media can be understood as a form of contemporary tribalness, including the symbolism that comes with it. March on, back to the tribe – forward to a next nature!
Create your own parade here.
If a light switch would be hairy or snotty nobody would want to turn on the light anymore, which is exactly why designer Katrin Baumgarten created some of the most one nauseating switches she could imagine.
One of the switches sprays snot at the one who dares to push it, while another one simply retreats when the finger comes near. A third one has tiny moving hairs to refrain you from switching. The message? Be mindful about your energy use. You really have to need the light before you dare switching one of Baumgartens disgusting creations.
The ‘Decay’ project explores how traces of time and use can be embedded in textile. By wearing a carbon fibre suit over a white blouse, textile designer Marie Ilse Bourlanges captured the gestures of the body bending, stretching, scratching and rubbing. The transfer imprint on the blouse was then translated into a pattern of lines that ebb and flower across the textile.
Via Slowlab. See also: Harddisk cover that evolves with your data, Agenda Wallpaper.
As our everyday living spaces are packed with electronics and become increasingly sentient, we might one wake up in a house that knows more about your family’s state than you do.
Designers James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau (remember their lustrous audio tooth?) are investigating if such technology would be helpful or too invasive. Their HappyLife project consists of a visual display linked to the thermal image camera, which employs facial recognition to differentiate between members of the family.
The human body is increasingly recognized as a biometric source of information for a wide spectrum of issues, including security, psychopathology, personality and health. Earlier we reported that job interviews might be replaced by brain scans within five years and denoted this news as a modern technological incarnation of occult palm reading. Now it turns out that palm reading itself has found a new incarnation – it’s in the ratio of your fingers.
John T. Manning, emeritus professor in psychology of the University of Central Lancashire and the University of Liverpool, has developed a new theory about how finger length relates to human biology and behavior. In the BBC series ‘Secret of The Sexes’, Manning successfully uses finger length ratio as a predictor for athletic ability.
A significant part of theory is focused on the so-called: ’digit ratio’, which concerns the full length ratio of only two fingers: index finger (2D) vs. ring finger (4D). In women the length of both fingers is usually about equal (2D:4D digit ratio = 1.00), while in men the ring finger is usually slightly longer (digit ratio = 0.98): a tiny sex difference.
Protection is the fundamental purpose of the helmet. This helmet, a conceptual design project by Seungjoo Lee, enables the storage and protection of memories. Plug in your USB to share ideas on this weeks peculiar image.
Image consumption has never been as cool as in this brand new clip by Studio Smack, which was created for the upcoming Graphic Design Festival.
The ‘Transparency Suit’ visualizes the unseen flow of information around us into a second skin, a suit that reveals a new field of visual code that increasingly defines who we are. Welcome in the Society of Simulations. Any resemblance with the Matrix is purely not coincidental.
After a ban on flying last weeks due to the volcanic eruption in Iceland, the European airspace was slowly rebooting to its old state of activity. This movie shows the movement of planes over time and shows how the activity grows.
Via Infosthetics
You know the HeHe collective from their laser projection on a power plant emission cloud. But did you know these folks have a real emission clouds fetish going on?
In this reverse pop–art work called Toy Emissions (My friends all drive Porsches) they navigated a smoke emitting toy car through the streets of New York.
