A Fountain Of Superhydrophobic Art

June 24, 2016 by James Hobson 29 Comments

Superhydrophobic coating finds a new application in art through [Arthur Carabott] in the form of a bizarre fountain.

A Master’s student in the Global Innovation Design course at the London Royal College of Art, [Carabott] achieved the effect by leaving parts of the laser-cut acrylic untouched by Rust-oleum’s NeverWet Multisurface coating. A 3d printed spigot mounted high above the surface imparts greater velocity to the impacting water so as it hits the acrylic the liquid forms into channels giving the impression of something surreal. Indeed — his design is inspired by the optical illusions of Japanese mathematician Kokichi Sugihara which attempt to realize the impossible artwork of M.C. Escher. The effect is worthy of a double take.

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Autonomous Musical Soundscapes From 42 Fans And 7 Lasers

June 24, 2016 by Donald Papp 6 Comments

[dmitry] writes in to let us know about a new project that combines lasers with fans and turns the resulting modulation of the light beams into an autonomous soundscape. The piece is called “divider” and is a large, wall-mounted set of rails upon which seven red lasers are mounted on one end with seven matching light sensors mounted on the other end. Interrupting the lasers’ paths are forty-two brushless fans. Four Arduino Megas control the unit.

Laser beams shining into light sensors don’t do much of anything on their own, but when spinning fan blades interrupt each laser beam it modulates the solid beams and turns the readings of the sensors on the far end into a changing electrical signal which can be played as sound. Light being modulated by fan blades to create sound is the operating principle behind a Fan Synth, which we’ve discussed before as being a kind of siren (or you can go direct to that article’s fan synth demo video to hear what kind of sounds are possible from such a system.)

This project takes this entire concept of a fan synth further by not only increasing the number of lasers and fans, but by tying it all together into an autonomous system. The lasers are interrupted repeatedly and constantly, but never simultaneously. Listen to and watch it in action in the video below.

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The Unity Of Dance And Architecture

June 22, 2016 by James Hobson 7 Comments

In an ambitious and ingenious blend of mechanical construction and the art of dance, [Syuko Kato] and [Vincent Huyghe] from The Bartlett School of Architecture’s Interactive Architecture Lab have designed a robotic system that creates structures from a dancer’s movements that they have christened Fabricating Performance.

A camera records the dancer’s movements, which are then analyzed and used to direct an industrial robot arm and an industrial CNC pipe bending machine to construct spatial artifacts. This creates a feedback loop — dance movements create architecture that becomes part of the performance which in turn interacts with the dancer. [Huyghe] suggests an ideal wherein an array of metal manipulating robots would be able to keep up with the movements of the performer and create a unique, fluid, and dynamic experience. This opens up some seriously cool concepts for performance art.

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Poetic SSIDs

June 6, 2016 by Elliot Williams 34 Comments

Artists see the same world that the rest of us do. They just see it from a little bit off to the left. Where you see picking an ESSID for your router as being a hassle, or an opportunity to insult your neighbors, [Dmitry], alias [::vtol::] sees a poetry-delivery mechanism.

Based on ESP8266 units, each “poet” has a battery and a switch. Turn it on and it changes its SSID once every ten seconds, feeding everyone who’s listening the next line of a poem. You can’t connect to the network, but you can occasionally hit refresh on your WiFi scanner and read along.

Since they’re so cheap to build, [::vtol::] sees them almost as if they were poetry-throwies. You could easily afford to leave a few around the city, guerilla-style, broadcasting your (slow) message one SSID at a time. We love the video clips (inlined below) of him riding the subway with the device on.

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FabLab Hackathon Gives The Gift Of Art Back To A Stranger In Need

June 5, 2016 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

If building the James Webb Space Telescope and F/A-18 fighter jets aren’t enough reasons to work for Northrop Grumman, there’s always the FabLab – the company sponsored hackerspace. It’s a place where anything goes and everything is possible, including giving the gift of art back to a stranger in need.

The video below tells the story of [Raul Pizarro], a young man and gifted artist. Diagnosed as a child with muscular dystrophy, [Raul] was getting to the point where the progressive weakening of his muscles was making it difficult to hold up his arm. [Raul]’s art was slipping away – until [Tony Long] caught wind of the story, that is. [Tony] runs the FabLab, and once he put out the word to his colleagues he got a hackathon together to work on solutions for [Raul].

What they came up with was an overhead support system with a tool balancer and custom articulated sling to reduce the effect of gravity and support [Raul]’s arm. To compensate for his reduced range of motion, they also built an easel with actuators that can raise and lower his canvases and position them where he needs them. It looks like the FabLab team paid special attention to making everything as smooth and stable as possible, and as a result [Raul] is back to doing what he does best. Oh, and if [Tony] and the FabLab sound familiar, it might be because he played host when our own [Mike Szczys] visited Northrop last year.

We really like to see hacks that help mankind as a whole, but there’s something special about a bunch of strangers coming together to help just one man too. Hats off to [Tony] and his FabLab team for pulling off a great hack and giving [Raul] back his art.

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Don’t Ignore The Artist’s Supply Store

May 10, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 49 Comments

So it’s Saturday morning and you’ve found yourself with an urge to build something involving copper plates or carbon electrodes. Maybe you need a metallic powder for a chemistry experiment. Casting supplies? Pure lead? Copper mesh? Silver wire? Odd tools? Exceedingly caustic etchants? There’s a store that sells it all, and it’s not usually frequented by hackers: the art store.

If you know where to look, the store is full of useful things. Each method of expression in art has its own set of supplies; a bountiful collection of various processes and the useful things therein. I grew up in a city that did not have a real art supply store. It had one of those big box craft stores that assault you with glittery plasticized flowers and terrible manufactured scents. When I moved to a different city and walked over to the local art supply to purchase some new pens I ended up staying for a few hours just looking at all the cool things they had for sale.

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3D Printer Prints Sound

May 8, 2016 by Al Williams 18 Comments

People like music, but they are also visual creatures. Perhaps that’s why music visualization is such a common project. Usually, you think of music visualization as using LEDs or a computer screen. However, [Gieeel] did his music visualization using a 3D printer.

Sure, the visualization is a little static compared to LEDs, but it does make an interesting conversation piece. The actual process isn’t very difficult, once you have the idea. [Gieeel] captured the waveform in Audacity, did a screen capture, and then converts the image to an SVG file using Inkscape.

From there, you can use many different CAD tools to convert the image into a 3D object. [Gieeel] used Autodesk Fusion 360 and had the resulting object professionally 3D printed.

We’ve seen other kinds of sound sculptures before. Of course, we’ve also seen a lot of traditional visualizations, as well.