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Bashir Sultani uses a salt shaker to make art, documenting his creative process in a series of intriguing YouTube videos. Subjects of the artist’s portraits range from pop-culture icons such as Lady Gaga, Charlie Sheen, and President Obama to legendary figures like Kurt Cobain, Bruce Lee, and Albert Einstein. Check out Sultani’s fascinating time-lapse videos after the jump.
The Joker
First thing’s first: Jad Abumrad does not know how he will spend half a million dollars, but it’s probably going right into his labor of love, the mind-bending radio show that earned him a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant this week.
“The central problem for me has always been that the show eats me alive, and how do I get out from under it just enough to re-imagine it? Particularly because the rest of my life is getting so chaotic,” he told me. (Abumrad has a 2-year-old child and another due in February.)
If you don’t know WNYC’s Radiolab or haven’t heard it before, I will break the rules of blogging now and ask you to leave this page and go listen. Abumrad and co-host Robert Krulwich (who has been experimenting with radio journalism since the ’70s) take big, huge ideas — time, randomness, mortality, fate — and shrink them into something edible and charming. It’s science that feels like play.
read the fully post by Andrew Phelps on NiemanLab.org
Excerpt:
"The Heart Machine is a collaborative art project that combines sculptural structures, flame effects and modern mechanics to create a compelling interactive experience that invites and thrives on it participation.
The piece features a 6-foot by 10-foot industrial heart as its center, surrounded by four 16 foot “arteries”. When touched or stroked by passersby, participants control the rhythm and size of the fireballs, shooting flames up to 25-feet into the sky. The exhibit also features technology originally created for the Ontario Car Industry, re-purposed to run the interactive elements of the sculpture.
It is also the first art project by a Canadian woman, Irving, to receive official honorarium status by Burning Man’s art team, as well as the first project from Eastern Canada to receive the competitive bursary. This year, in addition to Scotiabank Nuit Blanche’s support, the project has also been granted a special award from the Black Rock Arts Foundation (BRAF) to support its first Canadian presentation.
The sheer scale of the project, spanning 80ft x 80ft, has brought together makers from all walks of life, including an architect, welders, electricians, product and interaction designers, an anthropologist, a lawyer, students, a couple of engineers – one retired, and software experts, to name a few, from across the Greater Toronto Area. The piece will be located in “Zone B” at Scotiabank’s Nuit Blanche, near Bay & Edward Street in downtown Toronto. The piece will be engulfed in sand to emulate the conditions of the desert, where the piece was first displayed one year ago...."
Excerpt:
Ben Fritz, Los Angeles Times
September 25, 2011
Across Hollywood, a quiet revolution is brewing that's about to transform living rooms around the world.
After desperate attempts to prop up the industry's once-thriving DVD business, studio executives now believe the only hope of turning around a 40% decline in home entertainment revenue lies in rapidly accelerating the delivery of movies over the Internet.
In the next few years, the growing number of consumers with Internet-connected televisions, tablets and smartphones will face a dizzying array of options designed to make digital movie consumption a lot more convenient and to entice users to spend more money...."
Volkswagen Turns Norwegian Roadway into a Interactive Roulette Game
September 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment
To demonstrate just how far the new fuel-friendly Volkswagen Bluemotion Golf could travel on a single tank of glass, Norwegian agency Apt came up with the very creative idea. They decided to have two drivers head north from Oslo in the Golf using the road commonly known as the E6.
The road was divided into 80,000 car-length roulette slots using Google Maps and Streetview. A TV commercial informed Norwegians to go to the site and select the section of road that they thought the car would run out of fuel on. The lucky person who chose the correct section on the roadway won the car. Pretty simple right?
The whole drive was broadcasted live through the campaign website and 27 hours later the car finally came to a stop after driving 1527 kilometres north from Oslo.
By Joshua Benton, Excerpt via Nieman Lab
"It was one month ago today that we launched (as part of our redesign) Fuego, our heat-seeking Twitter bot. Fuego scans through the future-of-news sector of the Twitterverse to identify the stories that journalists, techies, and thinkers are reading and talking about right now.
Well, we believe in iterative design, so I’m very happy today to unveil a new version — call it Fuego 2.0. It’s live now — go check it out.
There are three major improvements worth noting:
A new design
The most obvious change is a very different look. For each story, we now give you a rich set of information, including its headline, its source, an image (if available), and a sample tweet linking to it. It arrays the top links in a tile/card style, making them much more scannable and visually interesting.
(This is done via the magic of Embedly, a Cambridge startup with an API that converts simple URLs into rich metadata, including headlines and images. It’s a very useful product for a particular set of needs; check them out.)..."
