The SF Fine Art Fair is this weekend at Fort Mason in SF. Tickets are $15. In all honesty, I don’t know much about this. Zer01, presenters of the 01SJ Biennial are sponsoring an entrance, so there should be something there beyond what you’d normally expect at a “fine art fair.”
UPDATE: Thu May 27 18:04:25 PDT 2010
Photos. I call special attention to Popperceptual by Patrick Hughes.
Just a reminder, Maker Faire is this weekend at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. 10 am to 8 pm, Saturday. 10 am to 6 pm Sunday. $20 adult, $10 student (with valid id), $5 kids.
Schedule is packed. I’d recommend Trisian Shone, and the Raygun Gothic Spaceship, which just looks amazing.
I doubt I’m going to make it this year. Instead, I’ll be attending the SF Fine Art Fair.
Tristan Shone is a one man doom metal band performing under the name “Author and Punisher.” His twist? He makes his own instruments. Things like throttles that control bass frequencies and sliders that control drums. He calls them “drone and dub machines.”
After the jump is an interview with Tristan, complete with performances, from Ground Control Magazine. Make talked about him last year as well.
Musically, it’s odd. There’s no getting around that. That’s not to say that it’s bad. I listen to some odd stuff. Personally, I find it kind of calming. It’s music to listen to in the dark late at night, and just wash over you. It’s not for everyone though.
If you’d like to see a performance, he’s performing at Makerfaire this year.
De Grisogono Meccanico DG:
Devon Treadmill:
Sometime in my childhood, maybe during junior high, I decided there were three things that were symbols of adulthood: coffee, leather wallets, and analog watches. These weren’t just symbols of adulthood, but symbols of The Establishment™. I swore them all off. In late high school or early collage, I surrender to coffee, but I have held on to my digital watches, and my cloth wallets.
It hasn’t always been easy. I recently carried a leather wallet for a few days last August, and I have been flirting with the idea of an all mechanical analog watch. (It must have a spring. It must need winding. Like the Akribos XXIV AK406SS, but only more durable.) Why mechanical? Because it’s classy, and testament to precision engineering. (Interestingly enough, Wikipedia describes how the number of jewels in the a mechanical watch is essentially meaningless ad copy.) Still, a mechanical watch is analog, and the rule 12 year old Jonathan made was “no watches with hands.”
These watches from De Grisogono and Devon get around that rule. They’re all mechanical, yet still digital. Ironically, the De Grisogono Meccanio DG is the most digital, yet also the most analog. It uses a series of cams to drive the seven segment displays. It’s ingenious. The Devon Tredmill on the other hand uses belts and geneva drives(?) to display the time directly.
Yes, both of these watches are extremely expensive and constitute a luxury good, they’re goods I’d love to have, just to admire how they work.
Evil Mad Scientist combined some LED throwies with sea urchin shells to create these interesting little lights. Throwies show up a lot on Make, probably because they’re brain dead simple, and like everything with LEDs, fun to look at. Wikipedia even lists some throwie derivatives.
I guess this means LEDs are the new candles. They’ve already taken over floaters, but at least the tea lights still have hot air balloons.
I loved Lego growing up. I still love Lego. It’s terrific fun. When Star Wars Lego came out, I said if it had come out 15 years earlier, my mind would have exploded. Still, I long for the great blue and grey color scheme of the Classic Space sets. I’d love for them to reintroduce them, or at least make the parts available again, or at the very least, have astronauts wear oxygen tanks again. Apparently, I’m not alone, with these feelings.
But that was yesterday, and this is today. Lego has announced that for the retirement of the Space Shuttle, they are releasing set 10213 Space Shuttle Adventure. The set features, detachable SRBs and ET, working cargo bay doors, a Canadarm, a satellite, and even deployable landing gears with realistic shuttle slope. (See demo after the jump.) Unfortunately, no oxygen tanks, and the space logo isn’t the same. But, at least the astronaut lives on in some form.
So why do I mention this? Around last Christmas, my mom was wondering if I wanted an exorbitantly desktop model of the Space Shuttle since I was a huge space geek growing up. I passed. This however, I want.
Ah, Vivien Muller! Is there anything you make that I won’t post? Above is Electree, his latest creation. It’s a purple Photonsynthese, and is being presented at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris on the occasion of the 1.618 sustainable luxury fair.
Limited to 1000 editions. Price €4950 (~ $6354).
I like it. I like the blue of Photonsynthese more though. Don’t like the price at all. More disturbingly, it’s just too derivative of his earlier work. It seems like the big change in this one is that it uses rare earth magnets instead of headphone jacks to mount the solar cells. Really, really don’t like that price.
Way back in 2002, and then later in 2004, Ryan Hoagland (old site) became both a brief old and new media sensation with both his Cityscape and Virtual Windows hacks.
Well he’s back, with Winscape, a motion corrected update of Virtual Windows. Using two plasma televisions hooked up to a mac mini, wiimote, and an IR necklace, static photos and video can be perspective corrected for the viewer with the necklace.
He says he’s planing on selling it as a kit for somewhere between $2.5k and $3k, which really isn’t that much when you consider that’s the cost of the hardware. (Alternately, the software is only $10.)
Video after the jump.
Jim Blackhurst’s SmartLED SolarTherm is a minimalist information display. Consisting of an RGB LED, a watch, and an ATTiny25 microcontroller. The chip contains a temperature sensor whose reading is displayed as light pulses. According the comments on Makezine, the internal temperature sensor is +/- 10 C (+/- 18 F), so its not very useful.
SolarTherm is simpar to M27’s Zach DeBord’s pummers. These charge a capacitor from a solar cell, and when the light level drops, the capacitor discharges, and causes an LED to blink.
While as an ambient displays these are visually interesting, especially Zach DeBord’s pummers, these seem to suffer from the main problem with all ambient displays. They trade simplicity for usefulness.
I want the display to be both pretty, but also informative. The display needs to be immediately interrogated. Similar to the how a grandfather clock provides a chime ever 15 minutes to an hour, but also can be viewed in order to learn the exact time. I’m thinking of something like Riedi and Gloor’s Weather Diorama.
Things like Nabaztag or the infinitely more endearing, Michael Kaminsky and Paul Dourish‘s SWEETPEA (aka “The Microsoft Barney Paper”) are more confusing than anything. Even baseball signs aren’t that confusing.
Maybe the best ambient display I’ve seen was simply a string hanging from a DC small motor wired directly into an ethernet cable. As packets would pass, the motor would be powered, causing the string to wiggle. As the network activity increased, so would the vigorousness of the string’s dancing. The great thing about this display is that it’s immediately and intuitively interpretable, while something more complex requires the user to learn some of sign language.
Years ago, I had this idea for a virtual fish tank. It would have five LCD displays (possibly touch screen) and a 3D rendering of fish inside. Each face of the cube would display the corresponding camera angle. For years that idea sat in a notebook, because I had no idea how to actually do it, and was making it way harder than it had to be. (I really have no idea how to do anything more complex than a cube in OpenGL.)
Well, it turns out someone at the University of British Columbia had the same idea, and built pCubee, a perspective corrected display box.
At least it was hard to do.
Fuck the iPad. I want this.
Video after the jump.
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