Creative uses of technology

The V & A has its day

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:35:01 +0000

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, founded after the Great Exhibition of 1851, still manages to create a buzz - and not only in the decorative arts for which it is justly famous. Visiting today I could have been forgiven for thinking I had wandered into the Tate Modern. Jason Bruges' lovely Mirror, Mirror located in the museum's pond in the John Madejski garden is a collection of interactive artefacts each with a web cam. When you move they project an image of you looking at them but as soon as you move they mutate into a sepulchral white (message there somewhere). Jason happened to be there today (see above) explaining what it was all about and referred to it as digital narcissus. This installation is part of the impressive Decode exhibition which is full of artworks that are made by, or interact with, people watching them including some where you don't know how they are being made until you go behind and find that the images are being created by by reactions between the movements of visitors and the sensitive screen. Go see.
The V and A is also host this weekend to some of the winners of Nokia's global competition to get hackers to exploit the potential of its powerful N900 mobile device which runs on the open source Maemo platform. The one with the most obvious commercial potential was a belt with eight sensors (see below right) that translates instructions from the satellite navigation system inside a phone via Bluetooth (short distance wireless signals) into vibrations on your belt indicating whether you should turn right or left or change direction. This has obvious attractions - most of all for handicapped people - and has the advantage over other kinds of interactive clothes that belts don't have to be sent to the laundry. The app that was the most fun was one built by two Australians enabling you to point empty aerosol canisters with a light at the top (actually filled with Bluetooth wireless hardware) towards an area recognised by the N900's sensors so you can draw shapes (below left) and, who knows pictures in the air, a sort of green graffiti. It was all pretty primitive but who knows what will emerge from all this experimenting with new technology.

Life in Venice

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:41:18 +0000

During the early 1850s John Ruskin published his masterpiece The Stones of Venice in order to trace the image of the city before it was forever lost and to record "the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like passing bells, against the stones of Venice". Today, over 150 years later, the threat to the City, exacerbated by global warming and rising sea levels, is no less real. But it could be that a different kind of 21st century stone could be riding to the rescue.
A new project announced today, Future Venice by an Anglo-Danish team claims to be able to use olive oil like droplets that can be programmed to transform CO2 into a limestone-like rock. This could be used to underpin existing buildings by reinforcing the existing stone or to construct a self-building biological barrier reef around the city. If it works then there are obvious uses in other parts of the world not least developing countries facing the threat of mass migration caused by rising seas. The prospect of turning buildings into self-repairing structures offers an equally exciting prospect for architecture in general. The inspiration behind Future Venice, and joint organiser of the linked architecture conference, is Rachel Armstrong, a British scientist, who teaches at University College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture where Neil Spiller, Professor of Architecture is her chief collaborator along with Martin Hanczyc from the Institute of Physics and Chemistry in Denmark.
I went to see the UCL team a few weeks ago together with guys from consultants GMJ who have already built a virtual reproduction of London to illustrate the effects of the Thames flooding and are working on a virtual world to do the same thing for Venice. The picture (above) is a GMJ mash-up in advance of the real thing. `I have to admit I found it a bit difficult to get my head around what they were saying at the time as the idea of self-building structures is so revolutionary it could have stepped out of one of Rachel Armstrong's own science fiction novels. Yet she reckons the technology will be ready in three to five years. You can see a video of the genesis of a protocell from an oil/water interface here. I have no idea whether these new approaches to architecture, which UCL specialises in, will change the world or become one of the numerous fascinating ideas that fail to make the journey to market. But no one could deny that they are very exciting. Whatever happens it will need a devil's advocate to look into any possible unintended consequences that might emerge in the long term. Ruskin himself cautioned architects not "to do anything ridiculous". Goodness knows what he would make of all this.

Silver birches by Tate Modern

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:30:52 +0000

I bought a Google Nexus One Android (see above) phone hoping to explore its creative uses - from photos to apps.

Instant appraisal after 10 days:

Loves:
1    Great 5 megapixel camera
2    Voice commands for text or search very impressive
3    Slick integrated calendar + gmail etc with multi-tasking functions
4    Pledged to open source - great for communal creativity
5    Comes with BBC iPlayer

Hates:
1    Touch screen very moody
2    Screen unreadable in sunlight
3    Mother Hubbard of an app store (but trying hard)
4    No direct buttons for phone or camera
5    Still can't get access to O2 network (even after talking to O2 shop)

You don’t need Michelangelo’s marble . . . just get an iPhone

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:09:22 +0000

If you thought painting with the Brushes application on an iPhone was pushing mobile art to its limits then think again. The SculptMaster app (free or premium versions) lets you sculpt - yes, make little sculptures - on your phone. You are presented with a three dimensional cube (which can be rotated through all angles) within which you can start making a virtual sculpture. I have only just started playing around with it and I must say it is intriguing. I notice that most of the early adopters - such asFlick Chick2 's Alberto Giacometti or John Bavaro's Bhudda (above) - use SculptMaster to do a basic shape and then import it into Brushes for painting in detail.
What next? Well, affordable three dimensional printers - enabling you to print out real objects - are starting to come onto the market so before long you may be able t make and sell sculptures from your iPhone. Well, until the next thing comes along, anyway.

1984 . . . the Gallery

Fri, 5 Feb 2010 18:56:07 +0000

Aleks Krotosky, presenter of the excellent BBC 2 series on the internet, is the creator of this very imaginative artwork. Every day she puts consecutive words from the beginning of Orwell’s 1984 on her Flickr website illustrated by a relevant image she has dreamed up herself.
If you use the CoolIris Flickr plugin you can manipulate the images and view them as if they are lined up in a gallery as above . Today’s contribution (Day 31) is the word “Slipped” written on a banana skin on a road near where she is staying in London. (Click below to see).Wonderful.