Make: Online: Arts Archives

Arts Archive: Arts

March 21, 2010

Paralyzed Graffiti Artist Draws With His Eyes @NPR

Eyewriter2 Wide

Paralyzed Graffiti Artist Draws With His Eyes @NPR...

A group of artists and hackers have crafted a gadget that lets a paralyzed graffiti artist continue making art using only his eyes. And it costs about as much as an iPod shuffle.

Zach Lieberman of the Graffiti Research Lab started working on the EyeWriter with one man in mind: Los Angeles-based graffiti artist Tony Quan. In 2003, Quan was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, leaving virtually every muscle in his body paralyzed except for his eyes. Lieberman and developers from Free Art and Technology, OpenFrameworks and the Ebeling Group were inspired to create low-cost, open-source hardware and software for eye-tracking to help Quan draw again.

Eye-tracking technology, where computers and small cameras harness eye movements for writing, highlighting Web site text and other tasks, has lead to digital tools for disabled users. However, as Lieberman tells NPR’s Liane Hansen, those devices usually have hefty price tags.

March 20, 2010

Electronic business card demonstrates transistor amplification

Aaron Alai designed this kicking electronic business card, which demonstrates how transistor amplifiers work. When you touch two electrodes on it, a small amount of current is conducted through your body, which is then amplified by a transistor to light an LED. I like the clean design, which is both functional and descriptive of how it works. [via Hacked Gadgets]

More:

MakerBotted Gothic cathedral does not require legion of serfs

Thingaverse user Skimbal designed and printed this Gothic cathedral play set on his Makerbot. The design is actually modular, so you can build as little or as big of a set as you want. I love the description:

Have you ever wanted a Gothic Cathedral of your very own?
Are you intimidated by the centuries long construction schedule, and the punishing job requirements of being a European Bishop during the Dark Ages?

Then We Have a Thing For YOU!

The Gothic Cathedral Play Set!

March 18, 2010

Featured Maker: Scott Teplin

New York based artist and illustrator Scott Teplin, aka Scott the Drawer, is a professional with an impressive resumé. He's had solo shows all over New York and Paris, and his art has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Keith Smith's 2004 The Structure of the Visual Book, to name just a few of his many publication credits. Scott's work is in permanent collections at the Smithsonian, SF-MOMA, and Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Universities, again to name just a few. Lately he's been doing some work for McSweeney's. This from his Makers Market bio:

If I go a day without drawing I tend to go a little crazy. Turning my ideas into lines and then back again (cycle repeats) pretty sums up what I do. I started drawing imagined apartments back in 2001 when I was dating a girl who lived in a long 6th floor walk-up apartment in Brooklyn (I lived on the other side of Brooklyn in a similar arrangement). For her birthday I made a pen & ink drawing of her domain from above, from memory. From then on I started to imagine tons of progressively crazier buildings with missing roofs. At the same time I was working on drawing 3-D phrases - so I decided to try combining the two concepts into large word-dwelling apartments. Several years later, after having two kids (with that woman, who I'm now married to) - I thought about making an alphabet in a somewhat refined and simplified, kid-friendly (but still a bit weird) series that you see for sale here.

He's got the entire alphabet available, as individual 10x12" prints, in editions of 15, "[l]etter press printed from etched magnesium plates on Zerkall vellum text, individually airbrushed with Winsor & Newton and Holbein watercolors, and curated with matching Prismacolor pencils." Alphabet City, a fine handmade, autographed, limited-edition book featuring the entire series, is also available.

March 17, 2010

Paintings of molecules

Alexander Kobulnicky has been painting molecules since 2007. Pictured above are heme and chlorophyll, but over at his site you'll find many many more, such as capsaicin, serotonin, prozac, pentobarbital, and LSD.

March 16, 2010

Handcar Regatta vehicles get the art treatment

Nice to see our friends who are involved in the Handcar Regatta, namely those behind the Screaming Vortex (above) and the Hennepin Crawler, get a little high-brow attention. They, along with some other awesome Regatta rigs, are on display at the University Art Gallery at Sonoma State University, in Rohnert Park, CA until March 4th.

More:

All of our Handcar Regatta coverage on Make: Online

March 15, 2010

Movie made using cross stitch

Filmmaker and crafter Holly Klein combined her talents to produce this short, Maggie and Mildred. All of the set pieces and characters were cross stitched by hand, then scanned into a computer and animated. [via fem!n*Ally]

Scenes from Handmade Music Brooklyn 3/8/10

The Handmade Music event series returns to Brooklyn, NY showcasing a talented collection of sonic experimentalists at Galapagos Art Space. A musical sewing machine, electro-country, the sound of blinking lights, and experimental gestural controllers were all on hand for the event.

In addition to the segments seen above, the night also included a performance by Mouse & the Billionaire which unfortunately I was unable to grab any footage of. In any case, a good time was had by all - stay tuned for details on the next installment in the series.

Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, watch it on YouTube, Vimeo, or download the m4v video.

March 12, 2010

Smallest zine in the world

Last year, I gave family members letters from the World's Smallest Postal Service for Christmas. They are awesome and make a fun gift.

Spotted on the MAKE Flickr pool is this professed "smallest zine in the world," an art "zine" done with eraser-carved stamps. I love the idea of doing eraser carvings on pencil heads. I've done them using art gum erasers, but never tried pencils.

Smallest Zine In The World

In the Makers Market: Build-Your-Own Ratmobile kit

Xylocopa Design just added a Build-Your-Own Ratmobile kit in their Makers Market store. Keep in mind the ratmobile pictured above is a fully painted version. Your kit will arrive unassembled, and unpainted, but that's half the fun!

Construct your very own ratmobile in minutes with this easy-to-build kit by Xylocopa Design. Your friends will be envious, and your enemies will flee (or is it the other way around?) when they see the glory of this fantastic little vehicle. Comes as an unpainted, unfinished kit. Just add glue (and, for the adventurous, paint, ornamentation, accessories, etc)!

Cardboard horse to hide paper tiger

Artists Juniper and T.J. Tangpuz built this paper horse out of cardboard and wire ties. Most impressive! [via boing boing]

March 11, 2010

Seasonal Flickr color cycle

This visualization of the way colors in Flickr images change over the course of the year was created by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of IBM's Visual Communication Lab. It's called "Flickr Flow."

The two of us see the world as a stream of color, and in 2009 we finally had a chance to draw the river in our heads. We began with a collection of photographs of the Boston Common taken from Flickr. Using an algorithm developed for the WIRED Anniversary visualization, our software calculated the relative proportions of different colors seen in photos taken in each month of the year, and plotted them on a wheel. The image [above] is an early sketch from the piece. Summer is at the top, with time proceeding clockwise.

The finished infographic, complete with seasonal labels and callouts of representative images, appeared in the Metric section of Boston magazine in March of 2009. You can view a low-res version of it here.

March 10, 2010

In the Makers Market: Wire trees

Makers Market seller Kevin of kaitrees has a bunch of great videos on his market blog. They range from details of the pieces themselves, to "slap tests", and works in progress. It's a neat look at the process that goes into making these pieces.

My sculptures are an effort to distill what real trees inspire in people into something one can have inside their living or working space.

This tree in the video above will require about 500 hours to complete, stand over 7 feet tall, and will use about 1000 strands of aluminum wire. It's his largest piece to date, and looks Amazing! I wonder how much it will weigh?

March 9, 2010

The city at night is made of light

Tokyo/Glow is an absolutely gorgeous short film, written and directed by Jonathan Bensimon, about the little glowing guy from a cross-walk sign who jumps down from the sign, at night, and wanders around Tokyo gawking at all the lights. I don't think there are any CG effects. The film's amazing look was achieved by combining a real actor in a custom glow-suit with a bunch of photographic hi-jinks: stop-motion, time-lapse, long exposure...did I miss anything?

Biomechanical steampunk taxidermy

We have blogged about American assemblage artist Ron Pippin's work before, with a focus on his wunderkammer pieces. But he's been busy since then. Fair warning: Much of Pippin's work uses real animal parts, and although I personally find it very beautiful, some viewers may be disturbed and/or offended. [via The Automata / Automaton Blog]

March 8, 2010

Altered thrift store art: Some personal faves

Unknown, via Reddit.

Banksy, via Flickr user goldenticket.

It's a simple idea: Find some bad art, whether original or a print, for a song at a thrift store, then modify it to make, if not "better art," then at least something that's more entertaining to look at. (Is it the same thing? Yeah, that sounds like a productive argument.)

Anyway. To quote a great sage, "there's a lot of guys doing it, but only one guy can be the best." That title probably goes to pseudonymous British graffiti artist Banksy. Most of the work presented below is his, but there are one or two gems from less-notables. I especially like the bland mountain landscape improved by the addition of an apocalyptic-scale katamari...

Just like the Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947

OK, so, it's not "symmetrical" book stacking. And I know for a fact that a human being did it. His name, it turns out, is Paul Octavious, and he's trying to raise book stacking to the status of fine art. [via Dude Craft]

March 7, 2010

Pomplamoose's "VideoSongs"

One of my new faves is YouTube phenoms Pomplamoose, a musical duo composed of Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte. On their YouTube channel, they post what they call "VideoSongs," quick and dirty (tho still quite professional) videos of them performing songs in their home studio. VideoSongs have two rules: 1. What you see is what you hear, and 2. If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds). I love the sense you get of them using all of these modern musical and A/V tools to do creative, improvisational work that they can instantly share with the world. What fun.

PomplamooseMusic Channel

March 4, 2010

It lives! The lamp lives!

The half life lamp by Joris Laarman is apparently powered by living, bioluminescent hamster cells. Don't worry, no furry rodents were harmed in the making, the lamp is said to be made from an old line of Chinese hamster cells. There isn't much information available about it yet, however it is part of a show that is opening today at the Friedman Benda Gallery in New York. [via inhabitat]