For Christmas I decided I would be laser cutting my parents gifts this year. I really liked the idea of a calender desk toy, and thought there was something really nice about the idea of building with time, so this construction toy calender, cut from 1/8th inch thick birch plywood and left natural, came about.
What I really like is that at the end of 2010, there’s no need to throw out this calender. Instead, a new calender for 2011 (and so forth) can be cut, and used with the previous year’s to build bigger and better creations.
I’ve posted the files for it, as well as assembly instructions, over on Thingiverse, so if you feel so inclined to make your own, be my guest.
Alison Ho and Liz Bayan have an opening at the John Ross Plaza Studio, in the South Water front. The show centralizes on the theme of reproduction and multiplicity. I’ve seen them putting it together (and helped out on a few touches here and there) and I’m really excited to see the whole thing put together. The show runs from 6-9 pm. Details after the cut.
Meow Meow (Liz Bayan + Alison Ho) presents
COPY CAT
March 4, 2010 from 6-9 pm at the John Ross gallery
Collaborative learning: “positive results of collaborative learning may be the notion that peer interaction stimulates elaboration of conceptual knowledge. In a collaborative learning situation, students must negotiate goals, represent problems and understand the meaning of concepts and procedures. Collaborative students have to make their thoughts explicit.”
Ludic interaction: “Ludic activities are motivated by values of curiosity, exploration, surprise, wonder and reflection rather than by externally defined tasks. These values stimulate the intrinsic motiviation to interact with a design or to say it short feed the desire to play.”
Their results (and basic interface) remind me a lot of my piece Tangolumen. One thing though, I think that their results are a bit generous. In their video the narrator says “…participants were eager to interact with, not just the control space, but also with the blimp itself…” But of course the participants in the prototyping phase were friends, classmates, and colleagues. These are people that are eager to play with everything you make, which while a real blessing, doesn’t make it the best gauge for interactivity. I’ll be eager to see how the blimp fares when it is at the Surrey 2010 Celebration site in Holland Park during 2010 Winter Olympic Games from Feb. 17-21.
Ok, I’m in love with this short film already. And I haven’t seen it yet. It premiered last night as part of the first-ever Opening Night’s Shorts Program at the Sundance Film Festival. But for those of us not at the festival, it’ll premier on www.imheremovie.com in March.
What I’m loving the most is the character design, where the robots look like bots that product designers in the 80s would have built, with beige plastic and think grey rubbery cords. Love it.
The site is also pretty beautifully designed, keeping with the films visual feel, and getting the nice sounds of clicking relays as it generates bits of on screen text.
I’m Here is a 30-minute love story about the relationship between two robots living in L.A. The film is written and directed by Spike Jonze. Andrew Garfield and Sienna Guillory are in the lead roles, and the soundtrack includes original music by Sam Spiegel and original songs by L.A.-based art musician Aska Matsumiya and other emerging musicians. I’m Here is released on this website in March.
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The film is a collaboration with ABSOLUT VODKA, and the partnership acknowledges the brand’s position as a pioneering and culture-shaping brand. Come back soon for more information about the film.
I know plenty of people who would be bothered by this sort of brand based patronage, but I love it because really, were it not for the brand support, no way would this film be seeing a world wide web distribution, and the vast majority of us would never see it. (Let alone that the film likely wouldn’t have been made. Someone has to pay for the arts.)
Gentleman, Scholar, and friend to all (and comic artist / world adventurer) Ryan Estrada is making a movie.
Specifically he’s making a 90 minute (aka feature length!) animated film based on his comic “The Kind You Don’t Take Home To Mother.”
The Kind You Don’t Take Home to Mother is an upcoming independent animated feature directed by Ryan Estrada. It’s a movie about a werewolf, but with one small difference. It takes place between full moons.
With four weeks of freedom until her next transformation, Julia Hobson faces a whole new set of horrors. First dates, disapproving parents, awkward social situations, and the looming lunar deadline that makes her wonder if her new relationship will last the full moon.
It’s only a matter of time before David Duncan finds out if Julia really is the girl of his dreams, or if life with a lycanthrope turns out to be too much to handle.
And you know what the coolest part is?
YOU can be in it. (Or your dog can be in it.) How freaking cool is that? All you have to do is help with the funding and in exchange you (or your dog) will be animated into it.
Check out the movie’s site and if (I mean when) you decide you’re into it, help make it happen. Because it’s going to be awesome, and you can be part of it.
While in Eugene this weekend setting up some art in a gallery installation, I found myself writing a piece of applescript to load a video, loop it, and place it in full screen whenever the computer booted up.
Then I encountered a small problem: when it loaded, the computer was placing the mouse cursor in the upper left corner of the screen, keeping the file menu visible, despite the full screen video.
Not wanting to make extra work for the gallery manager, I decided to solve the problem through applescript.
Now, there is not a direct command in applescript to control the mouse (which is a bummer, as that would have been incredibly easy.) but there is a way to emulate keystrokes. This is enough.
By enabling universal accessibility we can use key strokes to move the mouse.
To enable universal accessibility:
First, open up your system preferences, and go to “Universal Access.”
Next, go to “Mouse & Trackpad.”
Finally, turn on Mouse Keys.
Mouse keys allow you to use the number pad of the keyboard in place of a mouse.
Numpad 5 is click, and the numbers around it correspond to direction (2 down, 6 right, 3 down-right, and so on)
Once Mouse Keys are enabled, in applescript we can say tell application “System Events” to key code ##
with ## being replaced with the corresponding integer value of the key code (which you can determine using Full Key Codes) and it will move the cursor roughly 1 pixel in that direction.
Repeat that line a bunch of times, and you can ensure that your cursor won’t be in the top corner of the screen.
Artist Michael Vorfeld created an audio installation from the sounds of lights being turned on and off.
It’s very beautiful. I’m only a little disappointed that there isn’t more of a tonal range between the bulbs. (Also a little surprised that the sound is more of a ding than a hum.)
Honestly though, a room full of people playing pong like this couldn’t be any weirder than a room full of everyone doing the electric slide. (See: my prom.)
