DC-based artist, D. Billy, has been creating these limited-term street interventions, using balloons to animate/highlight/illustrate/notate the city. Very fun!
Balloon Street Art
Plant-Reactive Robots Make Music
An installation in Palm House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, Scotland where a variety of traditional Chinese instruments and chimes are controlled robotically in response to people and plants. The sounds produced by this are incredibly beautiful, watching the video of the installationis highly recommended. Built using Arduino, the installation reacts to the presence of humans and changes in the soil of the plant beds.
Similar and equally cool—Botanicalls, an open-source project that uses sensors to determine when plants need to be watered and then automatically calls its owner to ask to be watered.
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Turning TVs off With a Single-Purpose Universal Remote
This is the TV-B-Gone—it is a single-purpose universal remote that is used to shut off a large variety of televisions. You can see a video of it in action. It’s open-source, so it’s fairly easy to build using the instructions included on Ladyada’s website.
I was thinking about combining that with the Turn-Signal Biking Jacket project we looked at last week. We could basically build this remote into the front pocket of a jacket and run a switch to the tip of the sleeve and the go around the mall and turn off all the TVs.
And on a different, but related note, check out this blog, Creative Physical Computing, many, many in-progress projects using things like Arduino, Max/MSP/Jitter, Processing, Quartz Composer, etc.
Inflatable Street Art
Using the bursts of exhaust air coming from subways in New York, artist Joshua Allen Harris combines plastic bags and tape to create these inflatable sculptures that rise and die with the constant passing of subway trains.
The use of existing conditions and materials to create something so great is incredible.
You can watch a number of videos of the works in motion at New York Magazine or Wooster Collective.
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Visualizing Pollution + Making Nature Move
Visualizations have the potential to be incredibly powerful, helping us to understand issues and see potentially hidden connections between things. Bruce Sterling wrote as part of his Viridian Design Principles, that one should try to “make the invisible visible.”
Amateur Human is a group and/or single individual artist/designer who is making a variety of accessories to help to visualize and understand our energy consumption and effects thereof. The project pictured above is called Puff, and attempts to give the driver feedback on the amount of pollution coming from their tailpipe. Other projects include a fuel tracker and energy bank. Apparently these projects may also be made available as instructions to re-create them.
The person behind this is Karolina Sobecka, and I came across her site through another link to this other project she did, called Wildlife. From her website: “At night projections from moving cars are shone on the buildings downtown. Each car projects a video of a wild animal. The animal’s movements are programmed to correspond to the speed of the car: as the car moves, the animal runs along it speeding up and slowing down with the car, as the car stops, the animal stops also.”
Watch the video.
Graffiti for Butterflies
Interesting idea using UV Spray Paint (sunblock) to draw in migrating monarch butterflies to eat some milkweed nectar on their way over major cities. The image above is a screenshot from one of the videos, the flower is the graffiti that becomes coated in sunblock and acts as a “fast-food sign on a highway” for monarchs.
I think it’s interesting to use existing materials and conditions, but to draw special attention to them. I’m not sure that this is the most effective realization of this idea, then again it’s just a prototype…
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Image Fulgurator
The “Image Fulgurator” by Berlin-based artist Julius von Bismarck senses if a camera’s flash goes off and synchronizes a projection on the object being photographed at the same time. You have to see the video, wait until the end.
Broken City Lab is Alive
Welcome to Broken City Lab.
This website will exist as an ongoing discussion, brainstorm, collection of links, photos, video, ideas, and a record of our activities and endeavours.
I saw this on one of the lockers in LeBel, seemed appropriate to keep track of it.