While New Yorkers have been consumed by the stock market meltdown, a tiny little pet store quietly opened four days ago at 89 7th Avenue between West 4th and Bleeker Street in the West Village of New York City.

There are no puppies or kittens in the windows here.

Instead, a live leopard lounges on a tree in the window.

Or is it?

In other windows, things get a bit more bizarre.

McDonald's Chicken McNuggets sip barbecue sauce. A rabbit puts on her makeup. A CCTV camera nurtures its young.

Clearly, that this isn't your typical pet store.

So who's the "owner" of the Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill at 89 West 7th Avenue?

Banksy...

In Malmö, Sweden, artists have been replacing the boring street tiles with tiled images. Does anybody know how you'd get a photographic image glazed into a tile like that? The site may say, but I don't speak Swedish. Via Wooster Collective.

More:

Light-up sidewalk brick

Keene Valley resident Jerilea Zempel was detained at the U.S. border this summer because she had a drawing of a sport-utility vehicle in her sketchbook.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers told Zempel they suspected her of copyright infringement.

She was released after more than an hour in custody at the Houlton, Maine, port of entry from New Brunswick, Canada.

Her release came only after she persuaded border guards she was an artist doing a project that involved a crocheted SUV as a statement against America's dependence on oil and love for big vehicles.

"After going through my (laptop) computer, digital camera, cell phone, business cards, suitcase, reading materials, boxes of yarn and crochet tools, she returned with my sketchbook.

Zempel had drawn an SUV covered by a cozy, with its mirrors marked as "ears."

"My sketchbook puzzled her," Zempel said. "It was a cartoon sketch. They couldn't understand what I was doing. She said, Just what were you doing in Canada? We think you're engaged in some kind of copyright infringement."

Last weekend was TodaysArt Festival in The Hague (The Netherlands). The festival is all about creativity and audiovisual experiences. Pablo Valbuena was one of the artists who presented his work, he is known for his video projections on 3D objects.

More about Augmented Space

From now until the awesomeness that is Maker Faire Austin, I'll be highlighting projects that you can find at Travis County Fairgrounds on 10/18-19. Tickets here; see you there!

I'm excited to let you all know about a very hairy device debut occurring at Maker Faire Austin: the Hair and Balanced TV Filter Kit. In the Maker's own words:

The Hair and Balanced TV Filter taps into the composite video input to your TV, detects whether you are watching talking head pundits or newscasters, then draws moustaches on the faces on the screen. The TV filter is a new kind of hardware shield that helps users take control of their screen.

Read more here, and make sure you're at the expo center for the mustachioed fun!

The "Spore 1.1" project is a self-sustaining ecosystem for a rubber tree plant purchased from Home Depot where the economic health of Home Depot stock value is analyzed and used to control the watering of the plant through a custom built circuit. If the company does poorly and the plant dies, the plant is returned to Home Depot and replaced with another at no additional cost. Let's just hope that the economy starts improving so that we can save all of the house plants.

Spore 1.1

The dumpster is used to frame its contents - 1649 litres of filtered, chlorinated water. Its interior is lined with waterproof blue material while a pump and filter system ensures the purity of its contents. Powerful jets stimulate the sensorial experience.

Holy cow, I can't wait to see the Swarovski crystal-encrusted one of these for the Miss America pageant: the Pork Princess bacon tiara. Heed the warning, though:

You are going to be working with an enzyme that bonds protein. You are made of protein. Unless you want to glue your lungs together or glue your eyelids to your eyeballs, you absolutely must follow these safety rules. We cannot be held accountable for any mishaps you might have while working with transglutaminase.

Via BB.

Posterchild's seating caps make urban environments a bit more people-friendly

These pipes- as pokey, uncomfortable, and rough as they are- have long ago been reimagined as benches, repurposed as public seating on a street that has none.

I just made them more comfy!

This plaster installation piece by PROMETHEUS is at Infart in Bassano, Italy. Anybody know any more about it? Via Who Killed Bambi.

The Vertical Bed is an apparatus that allows humans, who have a cumbersome tendency to lapse into unconsciousness, to do so without sitting or lying down. This weekend, starting at 6 am on Saturday the 13th, I will engage in slumber in the standing position, incognito, in the public sphere, on the street. I will do this every four hours, at 6, 10, and 2, for forty minutes at a time, in a polyphasic sleep schedule. I will become architecture, absorbing the vertical nature of the city. If it works, apartments will cease to be necessary, the distinction between inside and outside, day and night, rest and activity will erode. Join me in my continuing professionalization of sleep at any time during the weekend.

The Computer Security Group at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) has released a short, chilling video demonstrating how a single person can hack an election on a touch-screen voting system --- even one with a so-called "Voter Verifiable Paper Trail" (VVPAT) added to it --- in such a way that it is highly unlikely that the manipulation would ever be detected by either the public or election officials.

Read more about Hacking a voting machine

More:

Princeton Hacks The Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

I bring my TV-B-Gone with me whenever I go out to eat, but it's hard to subtly use it without the waitstaff and other customers giving me funny looks. I wanted to put it in something that would be appropriate for eating out (so no hats, sorry, Mitch) that would allow for stealth TV-B-Goning, so I used a thrifted hoodie and some conductive thread to make a zipper-activated switch for the embedded device. Works wonderfully! Check out the instructable for making your own TV-B-Gone Hoodie. Next up will be a formal version for fancier establishments.

From the pages of MAKE:

TV-B-Gone Hat from MAKE:13 p.169 - Preview in the Digital Edition.

More:

• TV-B-Gone Clone
• Unzap - USB TV-B-Gone with learning function
• TV-B-Gone tampon case
  
• TV-B-Gone Gun
• TV-B-Gone kit in the Maker Shed

BOP - Making Sense of Space was a £1 million, two-year, multidisciplinary project, funded by the UK government's Technology Strategy Board. It investigated how ubiquitous computing, using wireless sensor networks (WSN), could be used to create a better understanding of the creative workplace. The project ended in December last year but I am still [finalising] the last few *project management* items.

More about Bop: Making Sense of Space

More:


Check out the Arduino Diecimila in the Maker SHED.

Great idea for your next guerilla lecture tour, a public-address system in a box - runs on C batteries!

The built-in sound system has a 20-watt amplifier and dual, 4" speakers that produce crisp sound from the briefcase's front panel, ensuring crystal clear orations. The 14" by 15" lectern props up the briefcase and easily accommodates legal pads and note cards. The unit provides two microphone options--a handheld condenser microphone with nine feet of cable and a 3/4" lavaliere model that clips to a tie or lapel. The control panel on the side of the briefcase enables tone and volume adjustments and the 13" gooseneck arm attaches to the briefcase and secures the handheld microphone at your preferred height.

Evan from F.A.T. figured out this air travel hack: put a big zip tie between to traytable supports to prevent seats from reclining. And to the poor dude sitting in front of Evan, don't take it personally, it's to fight unjust legroom cutbacks. I wonder if the two poeple sitting there next to each other could defy this trick by reclining together!

Randy shares documentation of his experiments using infrared LEDs to prevent cameras from recording his facial identity. The verdict - it no worky (at least with any of the LEDs tested) - How not to block cameras

More:

- IR LED glasses (anti-paparazzi)

- LED security camera disruptor on Hackszine

I spent the day with some of the people at AS220. It was a Saturday, so it was kind of quiet and we were able to see a lot of studios without getting in the way. Here is how AS220 describes themselves:

AS220 is a non-profit community arts space located in downtown Providence. Our mission is to provide an unjuried and uncensored forum for the arts. If you live in the state of Rhode Island, you will get an opportunity to exhibit or perform at AS220.

AS220 has evolved into kind of an anti-institutional institution. We've done our best to present the various facets of the organization without using the word "program" to box in what are simply organized human activities in pursuit of a common mission.

The AS220 Labs:

I spend most of my time on a tour of the facility and n the AS220 Labs. It is an amazing space where any Maker would feel right at home. They are constantly pushing technology and art in new directions. This is what the Lab's main responsibilities are, but they go way beyond this list.

German performance/media artist Johannes Kriedler created a composition comprised of samples taken from his own music collection. In order to legally present the work he is obligated to register each sample with GEMA(Germany's equivalent to the RIAA) by way of formal paper documentation. So what's the big deal? Well, Kriedler's piece uses a whole lotta samples - 70,200 of them make up the resulting 33 seconds of audio entitled product placements.

- product placements by Johannes Kreidler [via Synthtopia]

Riitta Ikonen makes these really neat costumes for becoming the objects around you. I think they're pretty whimsical and fun. Read the interview on We Make Money Not Art.

More:

Archisuit on CRAFT

An update on the pro-Tibet tech-art protests happening in Beijing: Students for a Free Tibet tells Boing Boing that a group of five pro-Tibet activists displayed an LED Throwie Banner near the Olympics site in Beijing, and were promptly detained by Chinese authorities.

From SFT, via email to BB:

This was inspired by GRL's "Throwies" project, and the building and implementation of this was done by a complete separate group of Tibet activitists. They combined a traditional protest banner with over five hundred throwie lights and batteries sewn and taped onto the banner.

Details on the SFT website, Photos on Flickr, and here is a short video. "Still no more news on GRL founder James Powderly at this point," a SFT rep tells us. Previous BB post on Powderly's detention in Beijing, over 24 hours ago.

My pal Randy just published an instructable for making an auto-answerer for a cell phone. It puts your callers on hold, wastes your minutes, and helps you promote your own band, not to mention bugs out your friends and confuses others. He hacked a bluetooth headset with some other components to make this customer service parody. Via fatlab.

Bill is the owner of a company that manufactures and installs car wash systems. Bill installed one of these systems in in Frederick, MD. The issue arose when the buyer complained he was losing significant amounts of money each day. He even accused Bill and his employees of ripping him off.

Naturally, Bill proceeded towards investigating the issue. He decided to mount a video camera to see who exactly is stealing all the coins. Imagine his surprise when he saw several birds carrying all the coins in their nest. After following the birds, he discovered its quarters on the top of a car wash and more in a tree, an estimated amount of $4,000.

We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself - but in the end "we" own it!

By establishing this autocannibalistic model we deconstruct the new global advertisment mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-based economic model.

After this process we hand over the common ownership of "our" Google Shares to the GTTP Ltd. [Google To The People Public Company] which distributes them back to the users (clickers) / public.

From the Radical Cross Stitch blog:

A few days ago members of the Melbourne Revolutionary Craft Circle went out armed with bags of finger knitted wool, seeds, painted banners, ribbons, thermoses, cups, cameras, chocolate and some sneaky hip flasks to engage in some creative resistance against the rampant speculation which is wreaking havoc in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray.

Concerned that there are increasing numbers of young people with nowhere to live while there is a ton of land lying around unused while the owners reap huge rewards as the property market delivers the rewards that are always guaranteed when a resource is scarce. And we were asking ourselves when the politicians are gonna realise that something needs to change when land values always go up at a higher rate than wage increases? There is a big connection between land speculation and the 27000 people who sleep it rough every night in Australia.

So we decided that all the boring chainlink fences in our suburb keeping people off the land needed a bit of cheering up.

Via Wooster Collective.