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  • La Vitrine’s LED Wall

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    Lighting artists, the Moment Factory installed on the front wall of Montreal’s La Vitrine theater a full length interactive LED display. Made up of hellalot of RGB leds, the patterns react to people as they pass on the street.

    Moment Factory designed the lighting effects for Nine inch Nails‘s (w00t) 2008 Lights in the Sky tour. There’s a video of them talking about the effects on the tour, and how they were controlled from the stage rather than pre-scripted like stage effects normally are, but a combination of flash and their website being in flux have foiled me. Still, if you like effects and/or NIN, find the video. It’s not that long.

    Previously. Previously.

    Another video after the jump.

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  • ImmorTall

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    Evan Miller‘s (Pixelante Studios) art game ImmorTall is an poignent game about an alien that crashes to earth, befriends a family, and then must protect them from the military.

    What I found most interesting about this game was the comments on Kongregate that sprung up around it. Predictably, there were those that got it, and those that didn’t (my favorite comments are after the jump), but that here was a game that didn’t have an explicit backstory, yet a common one kept reappearing: the military was there to attack the alien.

    I thought that was interesting, since I didn’t get that at all. Looking at the backgrounds, I imagine that the alien was that after a quiet time, war came to the countryside, and the alien was helping the family escape Von Trapp style (or so Rodgers and Hammerstein would have you think). The alien, was just caught in the middle like everyone else.

    I guess it’s just the effect of too many B-movies.

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  • Bridge Jumpers in 2009

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    It’s that time of year again, where we (and by “we,” I mean “The Marin County Coroner’s Office”) tally up the number of jumpers from the World’s Leading Suicide Magnet, YOUR GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE!

    A drumroll please….

    If you chose 31, congratulations! You win a year’s supply of Rice-a-Roni – The San Francisco Treat *ding* ding*. Yes, 31 successfully took the plunge in 2009 (That’s one every 11 days!), and another 77 managed to screw it up (like everything else in their miserable lives) and got stopped by staff. (Another year without a local Lai Jiansheng “helping” anyone.)

    So what about the $50 million net that was approved back in aught-eight? Well, that’s still in limbo, since the Bridge District has forbid local money to be used for the nets, and now the Bridge Rail Foundation is trying to get federal funds.

    Is 31 a lot? The Pro-Net folks would no doubt saying something vacuous like “Even a single jumper is one too many,” but let’s look the numbers. 31 is 72% more than then average since the bridge opened in 1937, but is that number really meaningful? The Bay Area’s population has been steadily increasing, so what about the “success” rate? There are over 7 million people in the Bay Area today. In 1940 there was less than 2 million. Perhaps if we want more informative numbers, we should look at this instead in terms of suicides per capita.

    Unfortunately, I don’t have the number of jumpers per decade, but
    the SF Examiner, provided a helpful table of the number of jumpers over the last eight years, that show that every year was “above average.”

    UPDATE: Tue Jan 26 00:23:45 PST 2010
    I realized that I did have the number of “splash hits” each year that the bridge opened, thanks to the Chron. The Chron’s count differs slightly from the Examiner’s, but not enough to matter. (The Chron counts one more in both 2002 and 2004.) Coupling this with Bay Area population stats, I calculated the GGB Suicides Per Capita.

    While I haven’t bothered to do any sort of significance testing, it appears that for the last 30 years, the number of successful suicides has remained constant after controlling for population. In fact, it appears pretty much constant for 4 of the last 5 decades. So just as I suspected, the “above average” statement is a bit misleading.

    If anyone wants to look at the numbers, I’m posting a CSV of the numbers.

  • Bay Bridge Arcology

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    With the Bay Bridge, seemingly always in the news*, the question is becoming, what to do with the old eastern span? (You remember the eastern span, don’t you?) Current plans are to simply demolish it, but architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello has proposed something different. They wants to convert it into a housing and a park.

    He calls his proposal, “The Bay Line,” is a combination of the Florence’s Ponte Vecchio and New York’s High Line. The upper deck would be converted into a greenway, while the lower deck (originally designed for freight trains) would contain commercial and residential spaces. Since the deck can support much weight than a typical home, additional space can be hung directly underneath the bridge.

    Rael’s graduate studio, have come up with other similar ideas, but they’re all essentially the same thing.

    It’s an interesting idea, but I do have some concerns. First, there’s going to be another earthquake. There just will be. So why would you want to be suspended a couple of hundred feet above the water, in a box that has been bolted onto a structure that is over 70 years, that is literally falling apart. (Well at least it’s not as bad as the old Cape Girardeau bridge. Yet.) Rael points out most of the damage back in 1989 was on the approach, not the cantilevers, but I still have my doubts. My other concern is that it’s right next to new bridge. Which means, you’re living right next to a freeway, and that’s got to ruin your view.

    But really, I’d just be happy if they name the eastern span the “Emperor Norton I Span”, but Oaklanders are such killjoys.

    *Nifty closeups of the recent repairs.

  • Obey Levi’s

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    Perhaps Maynard James Keenan would have would take issue with me, but if there was any doubt that Shepard Fairey has sold out, Levi’s hired Fairey to develop a clothing line, complete with a paste up at Times Square, should remove all doubt. The art? Obey Giant in the shape of a jeans pocket, and previously work (“Stay Up Girl” 2004 (Plate 196 in “Supply and Demand”, “Obey Factory” 2000 (Plate 201 ibid), and two others) defaced with Levi’s Giant and Levi’s new slogan, “Go Forth.”

    Granted the guy has to pay the bills, and he’s done commercial work before, but there seems like a line is crossed when you’re repurposing your own work for a marketing campaign, especially when your art is has a very strong anti-conformity, anti-establisment, anti-commerical bent to it. Then to top it off, you write:

    One of my main concepts with the [“This is Your God” show in 2003 at the Six Space Gallery in Los Angeles] (and the campaign as a whole) was that obedience is the most valuable currency. People rarely consider how much power they sacrifice by blindly following a self-serving corporation’s marketing agenda, and how their spending habits reflect the direction i which they choose to transfer power.

    At least the irony of the situation isn’t lost on one of us.

  • Score for a Hole in the Ground

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    Jem Finer, of The Pogues and the Long Player fame, project Score for a Hole in the Ground is a large horn erected in the middle of Kingswood, near the village of Challock in Kent, England.

    Inspired by suikinkutsu, the input end of the horn is located in the middle of a large pit, that has been covered with a grate. As water falls into the pit, it strikes a series of metal pans. The sound from these pans is then amplified by the horn.

    Unlike The Long Player, I don’t find this work a pretentious waste of time, because it is a complete composition. It pretends to be nothing more than what it is. A large horn in the middle of the woods. Conversely The Long Player is just an algorithmic looping of all permutations of some seed while people stand about clucking their tongues about the impermanence of man and the universe. It is the hipster Long Now clock .

    I like the idea of walking through the woods, hearing some odd watery sound, following it to it’s source and being confronted with a rather large metallic horn jutting up from the soil. The visual incongruity of the unmistakably artificial blending in to the landscape reminds me of the Monolith from 2001.

    If I had even a not so large wooded area, I would want one of these.

    via Oddstrument

  • Your Typical Jumper

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    I’ve posted about my morbid fascination before, but today the Chron wrote about the demographics of a jumper. (Well actually, it’s just a press release from The Bridge Rail Foundation dressed up as news, but it’s fascinating none the less.)

    The report, examines 15 years of jumpers, and answers some of my long standing questions about jumpers.

    How many people travel from outside the Bay Area simply to jump?
    83% are from the bay area, with just under half (49%) coming from Marin, Napa, San Francisco, and Sonoma counties. 6% come from outside of California, and only 3 (less than 1%) came from outside the US.

    Follow Up Question: How does the 6% outside of the state compare with other popular suicide sites? Is the bridge truly a “suicide magnet?”

    What does the typical jumper look like?
    White (80%), Male (74%), Never Married (56%), 40 year old student.

    In case you’re wondering: I’m against the rail and the nets. I think it will just move them behind closed doors and away from the tourists. Plus, there’s something romantic, and yet simultaneously incredibly selfish, about doing it in public.

  • Russian Atomic Powered Robot Lighthouses

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    In the 1970s the Soviet government, built a series of lighthouses around the Arctic Circle to aid in navigation. Since these were built in the most godforsaken parts of Siberia, they were not only automated, but nuclear powered. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, people began to strip them for metal, including the radiation shielding.

    When I read about this. I couldn’t help but think of Russia’s floating nuclear power plants, perhaps plying the seas past the lighthouses.

    But, what I really think of when I see the sea ravaged edifice is something out of a Life Without People episode. Nuclear powered autonomous lighthouses guiding nuclear powered autonomous ships to ports, where where they are loaded with ore from continuous conveyors, that are supplied by autonomous freight trains, until the day that there’s just nothing left to load on the trains, or on the ships, and the entire system shuts down and rusts.

    via JWZ

  • Watermarks

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    Last February Chris Bodle Watermarks Project was a series of projections throughout Bristol, England that illustrated high-tide water levels if the Greenland ice shelf would melt.

    I really like BLDGBLOG thoughts about this project. How idea of projecting a different geography over the current geography. A kind of public augmented reality.

    I would love for something like Watermarks to change people’s attitudes and motivate the radical changes that are needed, but it won’t. We’re doomed, by our own hubris.

  • Robot Gardeners

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    The Play Coalition created Plantbot, a servo powered planter. The idea is that the planter continuously tracks the sun, ensuring that the plant get maximal sunlight.

    My initial impression was that this was a really cool idea, but when I started thinking about it, it seems like yet another one of those ideas that are utterly impractical. I mean, do you really want furniture that constantly moves? Well I guess a dog is kind of like that, but it doesn’t immediately back to the same place. In all honesty though, that’s an engineering problem. An accelerometer to detect pickup and not move for some time after being placed back down. I guess the other thing is having it move back to its original position each morning. Well, I guess that’s just a search pattern. So, I guess none of this is that big of a problem.

    Adafruit links to Peter Sand‘s Fast Planting. (Alas, the video is broken.) Fast Planting is a track mounted robot for tending an herb garden. The cursor moves across and grabs interchangeable tool heads to plant, water, and trim the plants. Completely over engineered. 😉

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