The B-Hind devices demonstrates all the tensions inherent to an Internet of Things that inhabit the body without being noticed
Category Archive: gadgets
The artist’s critical approach to technology can be found in works such as an orchestra of musical instruments that mine for Bitcoins, a 3D printable kit to cut undersea internet cables, a Bitcoin mining machine that claims to be worst in the world, etc.
The Center for Technological Pain is a mock company that offers DIY and open source solutions to all sorts of physical ailments caused by our insouciant use of smartphones and laptops
advertising
Materialism is an impressive exercise in dismantling consumer culture, in leaving aside functions and in ennobling the resources we extract from the Earth at great human and environmental costs
Animals that fake their appearance to blend in their surrounding and attract their prey, people who fake a […]
Robots and computers are acting more and more like people. They’re driving around in cars, hooking us up with new lovers and talking to us out of the blue. But is the opposite also true— are people acting more and more like robots?
social
Over the past couple of years, Maria Roszkowska, Clément Renaud and Nicolas Maigret from DISNOVATION.ORG have been quietly smuggling odd-looking phones from China to Europe. They’ve got a phone that doubles up as a stun gun, one that’s shaped like a big strawberry, one you can use to light up your cigarette, one that will assist you in your religious rituals, etc.
Designers have to start thinking about transparency and accessibility in the design of privacy-sensitive products and services. This book offers the designer guidance, in the form of eight design principles, that help with designing products and services
Focusing on the alliance between Apple and Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn, Jack Linchuan Qiu examines how corporations and governments everywhere collude to build systems of domination, exploitation, and alienation
The works on show range from a robotic soccer robot to the Soccket energy generating football, from the ever irresistible and painful Leg Shocker to the world premier of Jer Thorp’s immersive installation The Time of the Game. The result is an exhibition that brings into a highly popular museum an entertaining but also critical and provocative view of the impact that technology has on ‘the beautiful game.’
Internet Yami-ichi (japanese for Black Market) is a flea market where people sell Internet-ish things face to face. It’s a place where artists, designers, art students and hackers sell objects, offer food and DIY workshop, set up hilarious performances and more generally bring Internet offline.
The last edition of the market took place in Amsterdam on 9 and 10 May. More precisely at the Flemish Arts Centre De Brakke Grond
Each object is made from the amount of toxic waste created in the production of three items of technology – a smartphone, a featherweight laptop and the cell of a smart car battery. Besides, the vases are sized in relation to the amount of waste created in the production of each item
The most banal-looking wooden frame takes a life of its own as soon as you come near it. It quickly positions itself in front of you, spots your eyes and starts expressing ’emotions’ based on your own. Eye Catcher uses the arm of an industrial robot, high power magnets, a hidden pinhole camera, ferrofluid and emotion recognition algorithms to explore novel interactive interfaces based on the mimicry and exchange of expressions
The machine prints self destructing documents. The documents merge images and texts extracted from Cold War fictions with excerpts from current secret documents, resulting in an amalgam that blurs the line between present reality and past fiction. A short amount of time after leaving the machine the documents burst into fire and their content is forever erased as the flames consume the paper
Superflux is looking at the ways emerging technologies interface with the environment and everyday life and the result of their research is a rather extraordinary portfolio which explores deviant economies for India’s elastic cities, climate change, political engagement, desertification, human enhancement, etc
Often both playful and critical, Benjamin Gaulon’s projects involve printing messages on walls using a PaintBall Gun, collecting video streams from wireless surveillance cameras, turning your videos into animated GIFs, developing radio controlled cars that physically react to messages sent on Twitter, giving an architectural dimension to the 1970s game PONG, circuit-bending, hacking, deconstructing and re-purposing “obsolete” electronic devices
The project is miles away from what you’d expect from an architecture work. No model, no plan. In fact, it looks more like an essay made of photos, short videos and texts. Together, they reflect on immoral architecture, unsympathetic machines, reality filtered by technology and more generally, our symbiotic relationship to technology. In fact, Madhav Kidao likens his project to “an exaggerated caricature of our present and near future relationships to technology as is stands.”
Designer Lisa Ma traveled to a joystick factory located in one of the suburbs of Shenzhen. She spent several weeks with the factory workers, sleeping in dorms, sharing their meals in the canteen, making friends.
Because most of these young factory workers come from a farming background and because joysticks might well become obsolete soon, she proposed to the factory owners that they would allow the joystick makers to work part-time in a nearby farm. She called the experiment ‘Farmification’ – using farming to keep the factory community together when work dwindles
Jacobsen is a media artist based in Copenhagen and an Adjunct Professor in Digital Culture and Mobile Communication at IT University, Copenhagen. His artistic work either closely follows social, political and ethical questions or sabotages technology, by mix-matching new and old media or by inviting web users to subvert web banners
The lack of Corporate and Governmental transparency has been a topic of much controversy in recent years, yet our only tool for encouraging greater openness is the slow, tedious process of policy reform.
Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin
While worn, exposure to the noise is structured through a sequence designated by a composer which controls the behavior of the sound-prevention valves. The composer also determines what values are adjustable by the listener through the single knob built into the device. The headphones mechanically create a personal listening experience by composing noise from the listener’s environment, rendering it differently familiar
The Urban Immune System Research, one of the 4 Making Future Work commissions, investigates parallel futures in the emergence of the ‘smart-city’. During their research, the Institute has produced a series of speculative prototypes that combine digital technology and biometrics: one of the devices ‘functions as a social sixth sense’, a second one is a backpack mounted with 4 megaphones that shouts out geo-located tweets as you walk around, a third one attempts to make its wearer get a sense of what might it feel like to walk through a ‘data cloud’ or a ‘data meadow’
A new exhibition celebrates the role of making in our lives by presenting an eclectic selection of over 100 exquisitely crafted objects, ranging from a life-size crochet bear to a ceramic eye patch, a fine metal flute to dry stone walling. Power of Making is a cabinet of curiosities showing works by both amateurs and leading makers from around the world to present a snapshot of making in our time
Cost is still a major limiting factor for low-carbon energy technologies. The Energy Pilots research program develops hypothetical business models by borrowing proven techniques from other sectors, and adapts them to fit the financial difficulties of specific low-carbon technologies
Jean-Baptiste Labrune’s presentation at The Council meeting gave a provocative (and much welcome) twist to the discussion about ‘the internet of things.’ Labrune’s talk revolved around the idea of developing organic circuits and, more broadly, about an internet of thing which might one day be made of material that grow, evolve, decay and die just like us
Prédiction was the biggest exhibition of the International Design Biennial in Saint Étienne. Its ambition was to reposition the boundaries of contemporary design, exploring in over 100 artefacts and 2000 m2 the new types, methods, and practices of the discipline
A sensorial wearable device forcing to smell grass and to hear your own breath. Equipped with fresh sod and headphones, this mask inhibit the visual system while enhancing the olfactory by the proximity with soil.
The device defines also a sensory territory constructed by the rhytm of the breath, which is diffused from the headphones with a 1.5 sec. delay
The latest project from New Zealand-based artists SWAMP is the Tardigotchi, a toy which houses two pets: a living organism called tardigrade and an alife avatar with a partially autonomous behaviour
Sitraka Rakotoniaina’s project explores a possible ‘Hyper-normal’ space on the edge of normality, whereby a distorted experience of reality is induced because of physical or psychological stress, injuries, conditioning or training
This private collection was founded in 1955 by Mexican architect Roberto Shimizu. Most of the toys were recovered from flea markets, bazars, suppliers, etc. They range from antique toys from the late 1800’s up to popular plastic action figures, dolls and baubles from the ’70s. Some of them are a bit uncanny….
Crowbot Jenny is a manga character. She is a socially-awkward girl who prefers to spend time surrounded by technology and animals rather than with humans. She built the Crowbot. Perched on her shoulder, the crow-shaped robot can vocalize a variety of crow calls to control and converse with her bird army
Developed in 1972 to protect early microprocessors from dust, the Gesundheit Radio featured a sneeze mechanism that expelled dust from inside the casing every six month. A bellows system extracted dust from inside the unit, blowing waste from two outlets located on the front
Given my notoriously campy taste in music, you will be relieved to know that i’m going to carefully avoid reviewing the music side of Barcelona’s International Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art. What’s left then? Fashion, a bit of advertising and the SonarMàtica exhibition
This suit allows one ardent fan to distinguish themselves from the crowd at film premieres. Comprised of a projector, speakers and a light system, controlled by an portable media player, the suits emits hysterical screams louder than the standard fan collective. As the target star approaches confessed messages are projected. When the wearer gets the attention from the object of their devotion, the suit rejoices by bursting into a climatic display
Thomas Thwaites is making a toaster, all by himself, from scratch – beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that is currently sold for a few pounds throughout the UK. A toaster. How hard can it be?
Tombstones as a path to re-asses our relationship to communication
Cultural Resistance, Psychological Exploration and Material Intervention are the key themes of an exhibition that the famous designer duo El Último Grito has curated at the LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
8 projects developed over 2 weeks in Mexico D.F. use hardware and software tools to create prototypes that explore the relations between machines and humour/laughter
A sculpture garden of everyday objects deprogrammed of their original function, embedded with new intelligence and transformed into surrealist and surprising readymades.
Vertical Bed is a sort of static prostheses that allows a person to fall asleep in a standing position. By bolting into cracks between the sidewalks, subway grates, or other rigid contact points, the suit will support it’s wearer with a minimum of visible hardware or occupied space, holding the sleeper’s weight with concealed harnesses