Changethethought

“The intention for this project was to make sound visible. As there is already a variety of ways in which sounds can be seen (equalizers, sub-titles, etc.), my aim was to produce a device where that representation of sound would be a physical one. I therefore used the sewing machine as the basis for the project as I feel it is synonymous with industry, and making physical products. Due to limitations in my computer programming skills this model of a stereo/sewing machine is a prototype of how I imagined the actual product would look.”

Via: Sounds Butter 

written by Christopher | tags: Product Design, Sounds Butter, Technology

This is a radically condensed demonstration of oblong’s g-speak spatial operating environment. IE: Minority Report for real (minus Tom Cruise).

written by Christopher | tags: G-Speak Spatial Operating, Oblong, Technology

I had almost forgotten entirely that I sent a couple images to Poolga a long long time ago for their ongoing free iPhone wallpaper project until I saw the above image posted on someone’s blog. If you haven’t yet visited Poolga, please do because aside from being just a really cool project offering up a nice bag of freebies, it is also a great source of inspiration for design, art and illustration as it now features a pretty impressive list of some really great artists, illustrators and designers.

written by Christopher | tags: Graphic Design, Illustration, iphone, Poolga, Wallpapers

This is pretty well done. Go here my friends to get your own Senator in your pocket.

Via The Denver Egotist.

written by Christopher | tags: iphone, iPhone Apps, John McCain, Pop Culture

Well, get ready for the electronic Newspaper. I remember reading about how it was becoming a real possibility but had no idea that the technology was still under aggressive development and this video confirmed that fact. It looks pretty damned cool.

written by Christopher | tags: Electronic Newspaper, Plastic Logic Reader, Technology

So where is the internet going? It has really only been around for about 5,000 days. So, what will happen in the next 5,000? Well, Kevin Kelly has some ideas.

written by Christopher | tags: Internet, Kevin Kelly, Technology, TED

Alright, I don’t really even pretend to be into cars. I kind of even hate having to own one in all honesty. I wish I lived in a city where I didn’t need one but there is maybe a handful of cities like that in the whole U.S. With that said, this new concept car from Audi did still manage to turn my head. It looks like one of those cars you would see in some movie about the future like Minority Report or A.I. I really thought the design was stunning and it would be pretty interesting to see something like this out on the road.

Here is a little more about it:
“The 2008 Audi O concept was designed by Ondrej Jirec, a design student from the Czech Republic who is beginning studies at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California in 2008.

The Audi O concept was designed to fuse a powerful and innovative audio system with a stylish and sporty four-seat hatchback. The exterior design uses several Audi trademark styling themes, especially at the front where the square grille sits neatly between the LED headlights. The doors feature glass windows running along the bottom edge which provide an interesting shape to the profile of the car. At the rear of the car the pullout door echoes the design of the squared off Audi grille.

The styling of the Audi O was influenced by a variety of sources including the Audi Shooting Brake concept from 2005, the Apple iPod and music.”

You can read more about it and see more images here.

written by Christopher | tags: Audi O, Concept Cars, Design, Technology

I don’t play World of Warcraft nor do I really claim to even understand it but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the absolutely fantastic 3D in the cinematic trailer for the new Wrath of Lich King game. It’s really beautiful work, the king of 3D that transcends technology and reaches art.

written by Christopher | tags: 3d, Cinematic Trailer, World of Warcraft, Wrath of Lich King

“The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 kilometer (17 mile) long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is preparing for its first small tests in early August, leading to a planned full-track test in September – and the first planned particle collisions before the end of the year. The final step before starting is the chilling of the entire collider to -271.25 C (-456.25 F). Here is a collection of photographs from CERN, showing various stages of completion of the LHC and several of its larger experiments (some over seven stories tall), over the past several years.”

You can read the full story here at The Boston Globe. There is also 27 absolutely spectacular photos of the collider companioned with the story.

written by Christopher | tags: Big Bang, Black Hole, Large Hadron Collider, Space Time, Technology

“Alex Dragulescu is a Romanian visual artist whose practice embraces both traditional and new media. His projects are experiments and explorations of algorithms, computational models, simulations and information visualizations that involve data derived from databases, spam emails, blogs and video game assets.

His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions worldwide in Madrid, Venice, Florence, Rome, Seoul, Sao Paolo, St Petersburg, La Habana, Arad, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki and the Biennial of Young Artists, Bucharest. In 2005, his software agent Blogbot, won the IBM New Media Award at the Stuttgart Festival for Expanded Media in Germany.

He has a BS in Cinema and Photography from Ithaca College and a Masters of Fine Arts in Visual Arts from University of California at San Diego. In September 2007, Dragulescu left the Experimental Game Lab + Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at UC San Diego and is now a researcher in the Social Media Group at the MIT Media Lab.”

It takes a real artist to create something beautiful out of email spam.

written by Christopher | tags: Alex Dragulescu, Art, Code, Programming, Technology

“We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what’s on our blogs, what’s in our hearts, what’s in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life.

– Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar
May 2006″

This has been online for a while now and I have neglected for no good reason to remember to post it. It is really amazing and you can really get caught up, once you realize what all is possible, in playing with it. It is Web 3.0 aggregate data thinking in action.

written by Christopher | tags: Aggregation, Emotion, Technology, We Feel Fine, Web 3.0, Web Design

Wow, this is one of those things that is just too weird to ignore. A teenager modified a laser-etching machine to give himself a Pac-Man tattoo. He disable the safety mechanism in the machine with a die and a magnet in order to get it to perform the job. It looks like it would hurt like hell but you can already imagine the implications and the ideas other people would get as to what they could have burned into them. I’ll pass on this one but it’s pretty interesting.

written by Christopher | tags: Creative, Laser Etching Tattoo, Tattoo, Technology