San Francisco enjoys many public artist events but perhaps few have been going as long as the Soap Box Derby races (officially city sanctioned or not). The first movie chronicles the 1975 making and racing the cars from the artist’s point of view often explaining their motivations for their creation. These artists received official city support as part of a fund raising activity for charity. The second video is from the 2007 version which is not formally organized with no official sanctioning from the city (and questionable legality) built entirely with the funds of the artists themselves.
Highly suggested you watch the movie in HD and full screen! This CG movie while not particularly novel in terms of abilities of recent developments in software modeling/rendering, is wonderfully put together and arranged. Alex Roman has a good eye for design and architecture and has successfully blended a number of notable timeless elements with new.
Swiss artist Zimoun creates kinetic sound sculpture installations which often use repetitive elements to magnify the impact of the sound characteristics.
The Happiness Hat is a wearable device that detects if you’re smiling and provides pain feedback if you’re not. An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, a servo motor moves a metal spike into the head inversely proportional to the degree of smile. Through repeated use of this conditioning device you can train your brain to smile all the time. This is the first in a series of Tools for Improved Social Interacting.
In a follow-up to a very early post regarding Fritz Kahn’s 1926 Der Mensch als Industriepalast, Henning M. Lederer has created industriepalast.com which includes the above animation and an interactive application.
Adaptive Ride Experiment No.1 put members of the general public in charge of trying to first “please” then “scare” and “excite” three bankers on a ride with spins and bucks. The members of the public were allowed to control the ride, but not view their chosen banker directly – instead they had to rely on a few biometric outputs to complete their tasks.
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony first movement visualized
Möbius Strip Bach
In each of these canons a musical line is played twice (or four times in Canon 10). The second version is always transformed with respect to the first by shifting in time, but it may also be shifted in pitch, turned upside-down, stretched, or played backwards. Each of these transformations occurs in the mathematics of elementary functions; they are examples of how new functions can be made out of old and of how a function can be tailored to fit a new situation.