I vividly remember being offended throughout my high-school education because ‘atoms’ where consistently presented as these perfect slick round little spheres. At one time I even called the teacher a fabricator of lies and shouted: “Atoms aren’t balls!!”.
Of course the poor man couldn’t help it, as it was just decided to teach us high-school kids a outdated, simplified 19th century version of the atom model, rather than confusing us with subatomic particles like protons, neutron, up-quarks, down-quarks, gluons and what do you have nowadays.
In retrospect I was just a kid trying to be witty after having flipped through some of the science magazines of my dad, who was a physicist. Nonetheless, I always remained keen on the underestimated role of simulations in modern science.
Are you still reading? Then this call for proposals might be for you. The STRP Festival, Institute of Complex Molecular Systems, and Animation Studio invite artists, designers and scientists to develop a new visual language for molecular structures.
“Recently, a new problem has emerged for molecular scientists. For many decennia they have used a world-wide accepted way of representing molecules, even though these molecules have never really been seen. Unfortunately, this language is not suitable to represent the increasing complexity of the molecular systems and dynamic processes that are subject of modern research. … We think that a breakthrough in this area is only possible with ideas of people with different specialisms.”
Download the full Call for Proposals (pdf).
Laurent La Gamba makes photographic installations dealing with camouflage. His work juggles with the idea of natural procrypsis in the urban space and deals with the relations among people, living environment, and technology.
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Remember the days when the flavor of a fruity drink was simply connected to an apple, orange, strawberry, kiwi, or perhaps – if you felt really exotic – an acai berry? Nowadays we quench our thirst with hyperreal beverages that serve us engineered tastes like Green punch, Wild ice zest berry, or Power-C Dragon fruit.
The Vitaminwater brand is moving to the next level by crowdsourcing its upcoming flavor. Fans are invited to collaborate on the design of their new drink. The design contest is organized through the launch of a Flavorcreator application on Facebook (watch out: you will have to let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends’ info, and other content for the app to work). Vitaminwater enthusiasts got the opportunity to name the flavor, write the bottle copy and design the label via a contest with the winner or winning team receiving a $5,000 prize from Vitaminwater. The result will be available in stores from March 2010.
We applaud this democratization of hyperreal flavors – if it the drink is designed anyway, why not let the customers have a say – and are now anticipating the first crowdsourced piece of fruit.
Via Coolhunting. Related: Organic Coke, Hyper Fruit, Why are carrots orange? Its political, Little Trees – Smells to refresh your car, Biomimicmarketd strawberry juice, Food design in the 21th century.
Old nature provided us with a wide variety of food: fresh milk, crispy vegetables, nutritious meat. Yet this is not enough, we want more:
We want a printed steak, square fishsticks, dinosaur nuggets, organic coca-cola, hyper fruit, cloned meat, potato-free potato chips, frankenwein, vegetarian hamburgers and hypernatural tomatoes. We want vitamine+Q10 yoghurt that makes you loose weight. We want to hear the sound of a sausage when we bite it – we want notice how well designed that sausage sound really is.
Already for thousands of years people have been food designers. How will food technology develop itself into the 21th century? The Philips Food Design Probes investigate how we will eat and source our food in the future, like in 15 to 20 years. There are 3 products we might have in our homes by then:
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Tags:
Bionics,
Design for debate,
Designed by Evolution,
Feed Back,
Food Technology,
Hypernature,
Image Consumption,
Made to debate,
manipulating growth,
Officegarden,
supermarket
Autimacy [aw-tih-muh-see] - noun, plural - cies. The term was coined by Simona Kicurovska.
Have you heard the buzz on virtual money in online games? Some years ago the first virtual millionaire was announced, yet there have also been reports on people being practically enslaved to farm virtual gold. The Chinese government recently announced to limit the use of ‘virtual’ currencies. An essay on the virtuality of money.
By KOERT VAN MENSVOORT
First of all we should realize the term virtual money is a pleonasm, a superfluous expression. Money is, by definition, virtual. And it always has been. Well, perhaps not in the time when people used cows and goats as barter. A cow is a living creature, and useful as well. You can drink its milk and when the creature no longer gives any milk you can always kill it and eat it. We may not think about, but it is actually a miracle that I can now at the butcher on the corner exchange a piece of paper for a rump steak.
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Our peculiar image of the week was created by artist Levi van Veluw, who reinvents the classical fine art of landscape painting, by moving from the traditional ‘oil on canvas’ to the use of his own face as a canvas.
By combing the romantic landscape and self-portrait genres he gives a fresh twist to the obsession inherent in the romantic landscape of recreating the world and simultaneously being part of it.
Look around you and try to find the most natural object in the room you are in now. It is you.
Related: In the Wilderness, Phone Trees, Day in the Dutch dunes, Biopresence: Human DNA trees.
Fruit does wonders for your health. No doubt about it. It is recommended to consume two pieces of fruit each day. One.. Sorry, I’ve lost count?
How convenient to have the two pieces of fruit mixed together in one product! Hunting and gathering has become too easy nowadays. Of course, you pay a bit extra for the service, as the retail price of Fruit2Day equals the price of FOUR pieces of fruit in their original packaging.
Related: Image consumption, How to grow an Orangina Bottle, Lucky Fruits, Modernistic watermelon, Cubic Fruit, Hyper Fruit, Banana Juice box. Thanks Hendrik-Jan.
It’s funny how these mixed up brands still feel like they make sense. Peculiar image of the week.
Getting information as fast as possible and on the spot is the trend. So what could be more direct than having information fired directly into the eye?
Today — together with his students — Babak A. Parviz, bionanotechnology expert at University of Washington, is already producing devices that have a lens with one wirelessly Radio Frequency powered LED. To turn such a lens into a functional browser, control circuits, communication circuits and miniature antennas will have to be integrated. These lenses will eventually include hundreds of semitransparent LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye: words, charts, imagery enabling the wearers to navigate their surroundings whithout distraction or disorientation. The optoelectronics in the lens may be controlled by a seperate device that relays information to the lens’s control circuit. Read the rest of this entry »
