art

363 Articles

Artist Inadvertently Builds Hodoscope

March 6, 2015 by 31 Comments

A Hodoscope is an instrument used to determine the trajectory of charged particles. It’s built out of a three-dimensional matrix of particle detectors – either PIN diodes or Geiger tubes – arranged in such a way that particles can be traced along coincident detectors, revealing their trajectory.

This is not a hodoscope. It’s a chandelier. This chandelier is made of 92 individual Geiger tubes, each connected to a single LED fixture and a speaker. When a charged particle flies through the room and hits a Geiger tube, the light fixture lights up, a ‘click’ plays on the speaker, and the entire room is enveloped in light for a short moment in time. If, however, that charged particle continues on to another Geiger tube, the trajectory of the particle can be deduced.

The purpose of the installation – beside just being art or something – is to show the viewer sources of radiation and normal levels of radioactivity due to terrestrial and cosmic sources. Of course the spacing of these detectors is rather large – it’s made to fit in a gallery – and there is no connection between the detectors, making a coincident circuit impossible. If you want a real hodoscope, here you go.

This installation can be seen at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY through April 12. If you’re in the area, go there and eat a banana. Video below. Thanks [David] for the tip.

Continue reading “Artist Inadvertently Builds Hodoscope” →

Interactive Sound With Glove And Tape

November 9, 2014 by 14 Comments

Here’s a way to explore new spaces in untraditional manners: a sonophore, or a glove equipped with a tape heads meant to explore spaces with magnetic tape tracing the walls.

This project is a followup to the analogue tape glove from a few years ago. In that project, aligned strips of magnetic tape cover a canvas, leaving anyone wearing the glove to track their hand horizontally swiping across different tracts, or vertically listening to each track.

This project takes a glove similar to the analogue tape glove, but the tape is spread out along the walls of the installation. There’s no way of knowing what strange voices are contained on the tapes; the only way to know is to explore the space.

Video of the project below. It’s a Vimeo, so you know it’s artistic.

Continue reading “Interactive Sound With Glove And Tape” →

Dottie The Flip Dot Clock

October 24, 2014 by 12 Comments

What is it that we like so much about inefficient, noisy clocks made with inappropriate technology? Answer the question for yourself by watching the video (below) that [David Henshaw] sent us of Dottie, the flip-dot clock.

But besides the piece itself, we really like the progression in the build log, from “how am I going to do this?” to a boxed-up, finished project.

Another stunning aspect of this build is just how nice an acrylic case and a raft of cleverly written software can make a project look. You’d never guess from the front that the back-side was an (incredible) rat’s nest of breadboards and Ethernet wires. Those random switching patterns make you forget all the wiring.

And the servo-steered, solenoid-driven chimes are simply sweet. We’re sure that we’d love to hear them in real life.

Continue reading “Dottie The Flip Dot Clock” →

Art From Brainwaves, Antifreeze, And Ferrofluid

October 3, 2014 by 15 Comments

Moscow artist [Dmitry Morozov] makes phenomenal geek-art. (That’s not disrespect — rather the highest praise.) And with Solaris, he’s done it again.

The piece itself looks like something out of a sci-fi or horror movie. Organic black forms coalesce and fade away underneath a glowing pool of green fluid. (Is it antifreeze?) On deeper inspection, the blob is moving in correspondence with a spectator’s brain activity. Cool.

You should definitely check out the videos. We love to watch ferrofluid just on its own — watching it bubble up out of a pool of contrasting toxic-green ooze is icing on the cake. Our only wish is that the camera spent more time on the piece itself.

Two minutes into the first video we get a little peek behind the curtain, and of course it’s done with an Arduino, a couple of motors, and a large permanent magnet. Move the motor around with input from an Epoc brain-activity sensor and you’re done. As with all good art, though, the result is significantly greater than the sum of its parts.

[Dmitry’s] work has been covered many, many times already on Hackaday, but he keeps turning out the gems. We could watch this one for hours.

Ask Hackaday: How Would You Build A Clock Clock?

September 21, 2014 by 96 Comments

Hotel art often elicits less than a glance from most patrons. But we have to admit if we came across a piece like this we’d be compelled to record a video for later reference. That’s actually where the video came from, this was spotted in a hotel called Ham Yard.

The concept seemed familiar to us and a bit of Google-fu brings up our previous coverage of the concept back in 2010. The display is made up of circular analog clocks and we’d wager this is a version of “a million times” by Human Since 1982, the same artist who brought us the earlier concept.

Since we’re covering this once again we thought it would be fun to ask: how would you go about building your own? There are several challenges that come to mind. First, notice both hands of the analog clocks appear to be exactly the same (there is no short hour hand). Driving the coils of a cheap clock directly (a la Lord Vetinari clock hacking) seems an obvious approach. But look closely and you’ll see the hands sometimes move in opposite directions. There must be a simple way to implement the control, or are we chasing a pipe dream of a low cost version for our workshop clock?

[Thanks Munit]

 

Robot Arm Artist

Watch Out Artists, Robots Take Your Job Next

September 16, 2014 by 26 Comments

Move over Claude Monet, there is a new act in town in the form of a robot capable of creating some pretty cool art.

We’ve seen robotic artists before but most of them are either cartesian-based or hanging drawbots. This is a full-fledged Sharpie-wielding robotic arm that draws with dots giving its work an impressionistic feel.

The actual robotic arm is a stock Interbotix WidowX. The folks over at Phantom Multimedia wrote some custom software that takes a graphic and breaks it down into a 1-bit representation. The code then goes through the bitmap at random, picking points to draw on the medium. The hard part of this project was figuring out how to translate the 2D image into 3D robotic arm movements. Since the arm has several joints, there are multiple mathematical solutions for arm position to move the marker to any given point. The team ended up writing an algorithm to determine the most efficient way to move from point to point. Even so, each drawing takes hours.

As if that wasn’t enough, the software was then reworked to probe positions. Instead of automatically moving the arm to a predetermined point, the arm is manually moved to a location and the data retrieved from the servo encoders is used to determine the position of a probe at the end of the arm. Each point taken in this manner can then be combined to generate a 3D model.

Continue reading “Watch Out Artists, Robots Take Your Job Next” →

City Lights Telling Stories

September 12, 2014 by 27 Comments

If you’re walking around town and you see a light suddenly start to switch on and off seemingly at random, don’t discount it as a loose wire so quickly. [René] has been hard at work on a project to use city lights of all shapes and sizes for Morse messages, and a way for anyone to easily decode these messages if they happen upon one while out and about.

The lights can tell any story that is programmed into them. The code on the site is written for an Arduino-style microcontroller but it could be easily exported to any device that can switch power to turn a light on and off. Any light can work, there’s even video of a single headlight on a van blinking out some dots and dashes.

The other part of this project is a smartphone app that can decode the messages using the camera, although any Morse code interpreter can translate the messages, or if you’re a ham radio enthusiast you might recognize the messages without any tools whatsoever!

The great thing about this project is that it uses everyday objects to hide messages in plain sight, but where only some will be able to find them. This is indeed true hacker fashion! If you’re interested in making your own Morse code light, the code is available on the project site.