Static: an Interactive Approach to Animation by Jack Lykins. Using a turntable and midi-controller via Max/MSP Jitter to drive the playback of an animation sequence. (via Cartoon Brew)
Tag: technology
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Static: an Interactive Approach to Animation
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An Italian vision of a scientific Utopia
The science journal Nature reviews the new book Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism by Christine Poggi. The review itself is a decent synopsis of the Futurist movement in art and literature and the role that modern technology played in shaping European political thought in the early 20th Century. (Note: the Italian Futurist utopian dream devolved rapidly into the very frightening march of fascism, and would eventually become our model for Blade Runner-style sci-fi dystopia…not something to idealize, but worth learning a lesson from)
The Futurists imagined a world governed by electricity. Their electrical fantasies, writes Poggi, take a Utopian turn in their vision and evolve into an orgy of violence. They saw Italy as being “fertilized” by electricity, banishing hunger, poverty, disease and work. Air temperature and ventilation would be controlled automatically, telephones would be wireless, and crops and forests would spring up at speed. But in this world of ease and plenty, fierce competition would arise over superabundant industrial production. War would break out, fought by “small mechanics” whose flesh resembled steel. Deploying “steel elephants” and battery-powered trains from afar, they would wage a thrilling interplanetary war.
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High-Definition Etch-a-Sketch
A 52″, net-enabled Etch-A-Sketch replica fashioned out of a projection tv, tent poles, stepper motors, and a golf tee.
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AR Record Scratching
Todd Vanderlin’s working on a project using OpenFrameworks and ARTag markers to simulate scratching a real record but using a camera as a the virtual needle. Nifty.
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The Shuftan process
An early film special effect using a partly-silvered mirror to reflect and superimpose miniatures or other off-camera devices.
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Button Given out at the 1939 Worlds Fairs
Button given out at the 1939 World’s Fair’s Futurama exhibit. I want one of these. (Photo lifted from Flickr user mmatins)
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Cinéorama
The original IMAX experience, circa 1900.
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In 1903 the Specialty Watch Company Helios Built
In 1903, the specialty watch company Helios built a trial run of miniature Boilerplates. The master of the hoax, an expert on Victorian automata, Paul Guinan, “tried” to “rebuild” one of these. The head resembles gas masks that soldiers wore in World War I, but as ornamental brass. The chest is as tubular as a Franklin stove, but gleaming with Baroque detail. Its knobby limbs were fully articulated , like an armature for special effect stop-motion seventy years later, or a thing in The City of Lost Children. […] For over a century, thousands of boilerplates have come down to us. They wait patiently. Patience has always been a virtue of the boilerplate; and of all hoaxes, including the Wizard of Oz himself. Norman M. Klein, in Building the Unexpected. From The Vatican to Vegas, 2004 p179.
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L’Aéronaute, the journal of the Société Française de navigation aerieene
Published from around 1868-1911, L’Aéronaute was a chronicle of early air flight in France.
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Gurney Was Still Haunted by the Baroque Search for
Gurney was still haunted by the Baroque search for a perfect vacuum, by the study of the phlogiston, as part of the philosophy of nature. So, like a mad Jesuit, he built a piano that played glowing bottles filled with burning hydrogen. Norman M. Klein, in Building the Unexpected. From The Vatican to Vegas, 2004 p150