Surreal toys
These and more surreal toys / sculptures are collected by the Underground Beinart collective (Australia).
What is Next Nature?
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.
Posts Tagged ‘Hyperreality’
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Grow Your Own 1up Mushroom Kit
Deep in the basement of an ancient house in Sonobe (tucked in the fields of Kyoto, Japan), an amazing discovery has been made: real 1up Mushrooms. The seller claims that eating the 1up Mushroom will grant “immortal life beyond dreams of man.”
Try to buy them and find out more.
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Playstation commercial
A peculiar image created by Erik Vervroegen for Sony Playstation.
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Sketch furniture
Is it possible to let a first sketch become an object, to design directly onto space? This is a question that Front Design have just asked in their project Sketch Furniture.
“The four FRONT members have developed a method to materialise free hand sketches. They make it possible by using a unique method where two advanced techniques are combined.
Pen strokes made in the air are recorded with Motion Capture and become 3D digital files; these are then materialised through Rapid Prototyping into real pieces of furniture.”
Started in Stockholm in 2003, this four women design group have been working in Japan for a number of weeks on this project. During Tokyo Design week they will show the process of making Sketch Furniture and the final pieces of furniture at Tokyo Wonder Site 31 October – 5 November. -
Salvation Mountain
Leonard Knight started this massive desert art project in 1985, Niland, California. For nearly 20 years he created the landscape with every shade and type of paint … and just a touch of the almighty.
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Big Brother enters virtual world
A version of the hit reality TV show Big Brother is to be staged in the online virtual world Second Life. Fifteen international Second Life residents will occupy a glass house on the site, with each one being voted off over a month until a winner remains.
Reality, reality, what is happening? As Friedrich Nietsche already said: “In the end every second nature becomes first nature”.
Source: www.endemol.nl
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fully automated news bulletin
News at Seven is a set of preferences for what a newsreport should be about. Using keywords entered by the user, the program selects news site RSS feeds and specific stories to focus on. The stories are edited for length and changed to make them more colloquial and suited to speech. News at Seven uses images and videos on sites like YouTube and Google Video. Further the software looks for words and phrases indicative of emotional impact. Finally a script is generated from the collated matereial. Text-to-speech software then lets animated characters take on the role of news anchors, with pictures and videos shown on a screen behind them. But news may also be read out like this.
found at: infolab.northwestern.edu | newscientisttech.com -
Hypernose
Hypernose is a short movie made by students of the HKU/KMT. Klick to view it here
Found at Lucky Coin Films -
Second life prostitute
The world’s oldest profession has made quick inroads into virtual life. You can make a quick buck if you’re willing to accept in-game money for sexual services -whether that’s just dirty chat, or full-on animated action. For example, “Khannea” took her first client on her very first day in Second Life, and since then has been busy working many days per week, several hours per day. She dresses her avatar in provocative clothing, and simulates sexual activity using a variety of animated actions and pre-recorded sounds.
“I do this for fun, because I am exceedingly good at it, and because I make relatively easy money,” she says. Khannea charges 750 Lindens (about $3 at current exchange rates) per half hour “of varied activity,” but clients generally tip more. On one occasion a man in game paid her 5,000 Lindens, but, she says, “I expect he was taking revenge on his [real world] girlfriend by spending her virtual money. It takes all kinds.”
Related posts: Online gamers unmasked, Meta meta reality, Online RPG funeral gets ambushed.
Read about more ways of making money in virtual worlds at Forbes.
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The Animal Sweater
The pattern on the Animal Sweater suggests a new way to experience commercial imagery. The Animal sweater, designed by Karl Grandin, was first shown at The Biggest Visual Power Show in Zollverein, Germany in 2006. The images here are from the Sandberg Institute’s New Work show in Amsterdam in September 2006. Check out the Animal site.
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Breaking News: CNN shows CNN
Today CNN.com shows a picture of a television tuned to CNN, in order to inform its viewers about nuclear tests in North Korea. Somehow I feel this is related to our investigations in Next Nature.
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Digital becomes physical. Move your cursor using this mouse cursor. You can buy one here.
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DNAncestry Project
“Become a part of history.” and “Your journey begins” are just two quotes from the Trace your ancestry with DNA website. That says enough about the business behind it, but what I find interesting is the fact that a global DNA database is building in which we see ourselves as a small piece of a puzzle. A nice challenge to solve it, because by reproducing our great DNA puzzle gets further away from “solved” (or?!). How much would I like to see the whole picture!
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Better than the real thing
Written by Debbie Mollenhagen
PART 1: FROM LINEAR TO CIRCULAR
Designer living has become designing life. I often ask myself: did it taste like the real thing? But when I open my eyes I see a world where plastic grows on trees and where everything tastes better than the real thing. A world which has been replaced with a copy of itself. When I was living in Australia I knew a girl who didn’t know where sultanas came from, which I thought was odd. After all, she was 15. How is it possible? I guess to me that was like buying one of those lemon squeeze things which came in the shape of a lemon, and thinking that they grew on trees. Plastics don’t grow on trees or do they?
Enjoy. Suddenly out of nothing, something fell from the sky. I found myself confronted with a piece of deformed fruit, I paused for a moment and tried to remain calm. I didn’t know what to do so I did what came naturally, I yelled back at the sky and told her that the fruit was not acceptable and that I would not eat it. Why should I, I thought? I demand more, I know my rights! I want to be able to express what I expect in my relationship with what I buy. How do I make a fruit more compatible with my needs? Then I remembered this thing fell from the sky, I didn’t buy it and besides in real life fruit has already been designed to accommodate my needs.
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Surreal weather conditions
Fascinating old nature. Somehow I find it hard to believe these weather photos are not computer rendered. Must be because of my Hollywood-special-effect-conditioned mind.
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Need for Speed
A transformation of the big flashing arrows from the computer game Need for Speed Underground 2, NFSU 2 to physical space. Although computer games generally try to imitate the physical world, there are always elements, objects & behaviors which can only exist in the virtual world.
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Firefox crop cirle – Aliens prefer firefox
Take back the field. This past weekend, the OSU Linux Users Group descended on a field in Oregon to create a 45,000+ square foot crop circle of Firefox.
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Visual Kitchen
This concept is a cutting board that has an integrated scale within a defined area on it’s surface. This allows a person to both cut and measure ingredients on the same surface with very little extra effort. There has been a tranformative trend in cooking based around the science of food. Central to this is the idea that precise measument leads to more possibilities for new flavors. Recipies will become more demanding, requiring simple ways to be precise in the kitchen.
