Interesting artcle about organics and evolutionary architecture
by admin on July 2nd, 2007
A couple of days ago I added a new text to the ‘sources‘ section of my site: “Organics“, a short but very utopic text published by William Katavolos in 1961, including a few drawings of the world to come. He had a vision of a new kind of building technology, enabling houses to be built by mixing a few preprogrammed chemical components as if they were a cups of instant soup. He describes this vision wholly in terms of plastics, catalysts and blow-molded shapes, but I think his dreams are suddenly very relevant again in our time as we are told biotechnology, artificial life, nanotechnology and modular robotics are almost there to invade and reshape our daily lives.
Read the rest of article here
Minority Report Interface to Google Earth
by admin on June 5th, 2007
Picked up via the ever impressive Oogle Earth Blog is the news that
Atlas Gloves were developed by Dan Phiffer and Mushon Zer-Aviv part of
the ITP - NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program. They have
developed a pair of ‘Atlas Gloves’. The gloves are a DIY physical
interface for controlling 3D mapping applications like Google Earth.
The user interface is based around a pair of illuminating gloves that
can be used to track intuitive hand gestures like grabbing, pulling,
reaching and rotating. The Atlas Glove website has a video of the
interface in action as well as details on how to build you own from a
pair of ping pong balls, led lights and a webcam.
originaly mobileaudience
Herzog’s Radical Transformations
by admin on May 22nd, 2007
Herzog says of 40 Bond Street:
“We like radical positions and we try to offer them. The idea of gates came to us first. It gave us a signature, a scale and an individuality. The gates introduce the scale of the townhouses. The question was what kind of structure or grid or image would they have on them. We tested different things and most of them looked too traditional but we then came up with the idea of something very chaotic which we thought could be seen as coming from urban street culture, where graffiti is part of the landscape. So we took graffiti and manipulated it on the computer, the result is radical but it was a classical process of transformation.”
via 765
AreYouHere?
by admin on May 12th, 2007
AreYouHere? is one of 12 urban interventions at the 52nd International Art Exhibition ‘Migration Addicts’
in Venice. ‘AreYouHere?’ is an urban mobile game that seeks to explore
Venice through its inhabitants of which many are now emigrants. More
and more Venetians are leaving the area to settle in other towns, and
as a consequence the population of Venice will be dramatically reduced
in the next 30-40 years. Bar and hotel owners now come from abroad,
while the town is losing its original inhabitants and becoming more and
more globalized. Labor emigrants from Asia are welcoming you and
serving you Italian food. You are in Venice. But are you really in
Venice? What do you see? Who do you meet? ‘AreYouHere?’ wishes to
adress these issues through an urban exploration of the people that
visitors meet during their stay.
Participants are invited to
follow a specific path, take photos with their mobile phone of the
people who live and work in Venice, and send these by MMS to a specific
number. All of these photos are then joined together to form a personal
postcard which is sent to the participant’s homeadress.
The ‘AreYouHere?’ intervention is created by TODO, and will take place from June 6 to June 15 this year.
from digitalexperience
eDrawings Professional for Google SketchUp
by admin on May 2nd, 2007
eDrawings for Google SketchUp provides an innovative way to share your designs. You can publish your SketchUp models to eDrawings files that can be packed into a self-executable (.exe). The self-executable file contains the viewer as well as the design data.This ensures that the recipients of such a files do not need to purchase or install any viewer to see the model.
You can also convert your eDrawings models to HTML format that can be kept on a webserver. Use Internet Explorer to see the models in the browser.
Click here for download and more about it.