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Spaxels Lightpainting

Spaxels Quadcopter Swarm Lightpainting / Linz, Austria. The Ars Electronica Futurelab is experimenting with long-time-exposure shots to create 3d-Models and animations in the sky.

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A look at Burning Man 2014

Burning Man is an annual event and a thriving year-round culture. The event takes place the week leading up to and including Labor Day, in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. The Burning Man organization (Black Rock City LLC) creates the infrastructure of Black Rock City, wherein attendees (or "participants") dedicate themselves to the spirit of community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. They depart one week later, leaving no trace. As simple as this may seem, trying to explain what Burning Man is to someone who has never been to the event is a bit like trying to explain what a particular color looks like to someone who is blind. In this section you will find the peripheral definitions of what the event is as a whole, but to truly understand this event, one must participate.

One of my favorite photographers, Trey Ratcliff, put together a folder of 100 of his favorite shots. Deffinitly worth the look > http://stuckincustoms.smugmug.com/Burning-Man-Page

A 30-Foot Skull Will Ignite Burning Man In A Blaze Of Projection Mapped Glory

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/a-30-foot-skull-will-ignite-burning-man-in-a-blaze-of-projection-mapped-glory

2014 HONORARIUM INSTALLATIONS
http://www.burningman.com/installations/art_honor.html

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Mind-Controlled Magnets Move A Fluorescent Green Pool

Known for creating experimental devices like a tattoo-powered musical instrument and a gravity-defying speaker, gizmo hacker :vtol: has teamed up with art scientist Julia Borovaya, robotics engineer Edward Rakhmanov, and neurophysiology professor Alexander Kaplan to construct a magnetic pool of liquid controlled by human brainwaves.

Known as Solaris, referring to the seminal sci-fi film that features an alien planet whose surface swirls according to astronauts' emotions, participants are linked to the pool by a brainwave-reading headpiece called the Emotiv Epoc. This neural interface sends signals to a motorized magnet embedded beneath the pool, effectively allowing the brain to control the movement of the liquid depending on the strength and formation of their focus. Since the magnet influences a body of magnetic liquid within the green goop, the brain—through two degrees of separation—this amorphous magnetic blob is controlled by thought.

According to the Solaris project description, once participants had a bit of practice, they were able to exercise deft control over the liquid. "The object copies your mental organization and echoes it on the liquid's surface," writes :vtol:. "The object becomes a part of the participant."

The latest development in a long—and growing—line of brainwave-integrated art, the versatility and potential for growth Solaris offers has us generating a few very excited brainwaves of our own. Once we have a brainwave-powered Netflix machine, we're pretty sure civilization will grind to a halt—but until then, we're more than happy to play around with :vtol:'s magnetic brainwave-powered pool.

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Emotional Tweets Make This Sculpture Leak Colorful Paint

Imagine if the the marble statues of Ancient Rome spurted out paint like a fountain, but the colors reflected the general mood of the empire's populace. MONOLITT, an interactive installation created by Syver Lauritzen and Eirik Haugen Murvol at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, experiments with a similar idea, as a miniature pedestal takes crowdsourced "sentiment analytics" and turns them into physical paint data visualizations.

In a video detailing the project, above, we see users tweet messages like "Annoyed" or "Feeling good," which triggers certain paint colors that then dribble out of the top of a white statue to make a "procedurally generated three-dimensional painting." Though the clip doesn't explain the technology, we'd guess that MONOLITT is equipped with Raspberry Pi and an API that turns the social media data into physical manifestations. 

Though the Oslo-based MONOLITT sculpture trickled out vibrant globs of pink and blue (presumably associated with positive tweets), we wonder what an NYC rendition of the installation would look like. If we had to guess, there'd be so many opinionated, impatient tweets that a Manhattan MONOLITT would look like a messy spray of bleak goop.

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