with all of the products and concepts that exist around a single technology (in this case USB memory sticks) it seems that we are heading towards a place where design for the masses may not be necessary any more and each object can become a unique expression of the individual
tickle salon by driessens & verstappen uses a curtain poof suspended from a four fishing lines to tickle while at the same time producing a three-dimensional image of the user’s body
yesterday at siggraph 2006 in boston i tried on the forehead retina system, a headband with a grid of 512 electrodes that stiimulate the skin on the forehead through a conductive gel pad with the ‘image’ captured through a video camera mounted on a pair of sunglasses. the idea is to provide sight to those without it, by ‘feeling’ the field of view with the touch sense. the feeling is quite brusque, like being scratched with long nails, and you can distinctly make out a white line on a black background (like the primitive visual cortex can) but nothing more. real-world scenes are too noisy and give a feeling that disctinctly resembles a sinus headache. this work offers slightly more discreteness and portability than the similar tongue-based system, it may never lead to an effective vision aid because acuity and pattern recognition for the skin are generally weak.
mexican sculptor javier marin makes beautiful deconstructed figural statues in the classical tradition – this is a tower representing human suffering in plaza juarez, mexico city
via maman
a number of stunning visualizations portray the violence our government inflicts on the world: john maeda’s text visualization of 400,000 dead in darfur,
obleek.com’s animation of deaths in iraq over space and time,
cryptome.org’s graphs of american dead in iraq,
the recent new york times graphic of mideast tensions,
and visualisation of relative israeli UN and lebanese deaths in the current war.
fernando botero’s obese style of figurative painting was often humorous and whimsical, but that changed when he chose to depict the torture at abu ghraib. now the subjects’ fatness seems to add to the already extreme obscenity of these scenes
see the paintings
researchers are beginning to use fMRI for bio-feedback to treat psychological problems such as addiction, pain and depression. by watching a real-time scan of the areas of the brain rich with oxygen, you can get understand your own thought processes and possibly even control them. recent findings about mental plasticity suggest that repeating such exercises could lead to permanent repair of undesirable thought circuits. just like dancing in front of the mirror, watching ourselves think could make us exercise our mental muscles with greater precision and grow agile minds.
via technology review
this beautiful thing is an omni-directional light sensor made of light-sensitive fibers by yael fink’s team at MIT.
via mit
