I really enjoy the talks of most TED speakers. Especially like Mr Enriquez... Short glimpses of possible futures... Whatever the actual time frame, most of it is actually going to happen, eventually. Pretty much sounds like science fiction - except that by now we know better than just dismissing all these crazy ideas. Who would have thought you could speak to someone on the other side of the planet through a little box 300 years ago? Thought-provoking to say the least.
From Boston Dynamics' website:
"The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth
BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog's legs are articulated like an animal's, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight [...]. BigDog is being developed by Boston Dynamics with the goal of creating robots that have rough-terrain mobility that can take them anywhere on Earth that people and animals can go. The program is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)."
Ah the possibilities...
And of course the always practical liveware version, even though slightly less reliable:
Really cool sculptures by British artist couple Tim Noble and Sue Webster. Each piece doesn't look like much in itself, but cast incredibly realistic shadows - usually representing them - once shed light upon. This first sculpture is called “Dirty White Trash (With Gulls)”, and is composed of six months of rubbish from the artists. Which makes me wonder about the smell of those shadows?
“Morpho Towers - Two Standing Spirals” is an installation by Sachiko Kodama that consists of two ferrofluid sculptures that move synthetically to music. The iron bodies of the electromagnetic spiral towers have an helical design so that spikes of ferrofluid move up, trembling and rotating around the edge of the spirals when the magnetic field is strong enough.
Depending on DC bias voltage and AC pattern corresponding to the music metadata such as beat position, chord progression, and melody block information, the tower’s surface dynamically morphs into a variety of textures ranging from smooth, black fluid to spikes spreading like fractals, defying gravity.
Again what I love in this sort of installation is that the piece is not an end in itself. It is not just art, or self-centered. Beyond the sheer aesthetics and physical abstraction of the constantly evolving shapes, it is just full of possibilities. We are surrounded by digital data and yet it is still pretty rare to see it actually transformed into any kind of analogue physical phenomena beside sound or light - something palpable. I am completely fascinated by the soft, organic pulsations as if the fluid was breathing, with the complexity and apparent unpredictability we usually associate with living beings. With the current progress in nano and biotechnologies we'll probably end up seeing devices or even androids made of similar stuff one day.
From Sachiko Kodama's website: "In this art we want to harmonize several opposing properties, such as hardness (iron) / softness (fluid) and freedom (desire for design) / restriction (natural powers such as gravity). This work emerges as an autonomous transformation of the material itself: sometimes it seems like a horn, sometimes a fir tree, and sometimes even like the Tower of Babel." She also has a number of similar interesting projects here.
I love the works of Paris-based community of digital artists Pleix. Unpretentious yet sophisticated, fun, inspired, and nicely sarastic, it just doesn't get much better than this. Who doesn't love flying doggies, giant rabbits and the Simon game anyway?
"Since about ten years Dutch artist Theo Jansen has been busy creating a new nature with plastic tubes, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, hose, and tape as the basic material for creatures which are able to walk feeding only on wind. Eventually he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives in the wild, multiplying and striving for survival.
Artist, technician, inventor and you might also say poet, his walking sculptures look alive as they move and are able of basic reactions to their environment thanks to antennas, legs, muscles (pneumatic pistons within the plastic tubes), stomachs (plastic bottles for storing air), and nerves (primitive logic gates) that can for example be used to reverse the machine’s direction if it senses dangerous water, or loose sand where it might get stuck. By applying the principles of evolution to the world of machines through breeding of the most successful species, and using algorithms on a computer he managed to take the best bits from each to make them better generation after generation."
This guy is a biomechanics genius. How a single man can achieve that alone with such limited resources blows my mind. It's not only the technical realization of his sculptures that is amazing - he has a true vision of creating new lifeforms. All of this without a single piece of electronics. Makes you wonder what he could do given a solid budget and access to state-of-the-art technologies. In this digital age who'd think that the first artificial lifeforms would be analog?
Camera Lucida is a very interesting project by Russian/American installation and video artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, developed in collaboration with scientific laboratories in Japan, Germany, Russia and Belgium. Camera Lucida (chamber of light or lucidity) is a 3-dimensional sonic observatory that directly transforms sound into light by employing a phenomenon known as sonoluminescence: "ultrasound, propagating within a liquid, triggers the formation and implosion of micro-bubbles that reach temperatures as high as are found on the sun, and emit light in the shape of sound waves". It all sounds complicated but it is totally mesmerizing, and simply said, very cool to look at. I really like the idea of taking advanced research lab equipment out of context and using it for artistic purposes. Not to spoil anything the authors have asked great minimal sound artists such as Taylor Deupree, Richard Chartier and Alva Noto to create the sonochemical compositions. The piece is released as a DVD on Line, a subdivision of experimental ambient, techno and minimal label 12k.
"Camera Lucida is a highly introspective immersive spatial art work creating a fleeting ephemeral materiality by intersecting ultrasound with hyperlight... in essence the creation of a sonic aurora. Domnitch and Gelfand's piece rejects any possibility to be fixed in space and time, but rather offers up the very definition of an unstable work of art, existing entirely for and within the perceptive realm of the viewer." Stephen Kovats, Director of Transmediale 2008". From Line's press release.
