Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Kami-Robo

The trail of trust and treachery reveals the dynamic history of Kami-Robo wrestling. At the same time, the character of each wrestler becomes more apparent with each fight. Some are macho, some timid, some shrewd, some stubborn. Both in and out of the ring, the fighters have lives and stories to tell.


Kami-robo are cardboard robots are a creation of Shukan Taishu. There are over 200 different robots and each has his own persona.



He says he imagines how his kami-robo would behave in certain situations and cope with certain consequences. And while playing with them, he thinks about which wrestlers he admires and those he despises.

Wrapped up in our own dreamland, perhaps we all can construct such vivid simulations. Maybe such games help us to unconsciously figure out what kind of people we want to be and what is most important in life.




Although these creations are cardboard they illustrate another avenue of expression that can be fulfilled by artifacturing. The Japanese seem to be good at this: they can create characters that express an idea, a personality type or emotion. Kami-robo lets them also have battles and relationships.
The robots have a large following in Japan with hundreds of spectators crowding around huge screens to watch the matches live and cheer for their favorite.


See a wrestling video...


Kami-Robo

Friday, August 19, 2005

Model and Live Webcam Bring Landscape to Life

An art installation of urban landscape made from the combination of artifactured 'geography' with live action projected onto it.

The model brings a tangible presence to the place and the live webcam feed brings it to life.
Highlights the seperation between permanent and transient.



Webcams give us the possibility to have a look at distant places/times in realtime. Roermond-Ecke-Schönhauser, by Markus Kison, transforms this distant reality into something more tangible. Four webcam-streams from different parts of Europe (Denmark, crossing; Amsterdam, laundromat ; Berlin, courtyard and a marketplace in Holland) are projected on four acrylic models of the corresponding places.

see the video...

via...
we make money not art: Live webcam-miniature of a distant place

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Email Artifactures Noise

Most people try to extract the important information out of the flood of daily emails.
Why not extract the noise? And express the noise as an artifact while you're at it. Art!


E-mail Erosion is an installation that automatically creates sculptures, using spam and e-mail as data to trigger the sculpting process.

The installation, viewable via four webcams, consists of a powder-coat painted, steel frame that measures approximately 42"x 42"x 78". Each side of the frame has a "bot"—a mechanism which can freely move to any point on the side’s face, working much like a flat-bed plotter. In addition to moving, the bots can squirt water into the frame, causing a section of a large block of biodegradable (starch-based) styrofoam to dissolve.


Each of the bots is associated with an e-mail address. When e-mail is received by a bot, it is triggered to either move or squirt water—the particular action being determined by an algorithm that uses the e-mail’s content as input data. The bots email a response to every email they receive, but limit their move/squirt actions to once a day for each address from which they receive email.

People visiting the website will be invited to email the bots. In addition, e-mail will be generated by putting the bots’ e-mail addresses on mailing lists and in places (e.g., the Usenet) likely to be picked up by spammers.

When a bot is triggered, the associated email is displayed on the website next to the bot’s webcam. Whenever a bot moves or squirts, the video of the action is appended to a Quicktime video so that people browsing the website can watch a time-elapse video synopsis of the sculpting process so far.

At the end of the show, the remaining foam, if any, is a finished sculpture.
Ethan Ham, Project Coordinator

via...
we make money not art: Sculpted by email and spam

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Warming to Hyperbolic Space

"Though seemingly obvious, the property of “straightness” turns out to be a subtle and surprisingly fecund concept. Understanding this quality ultimately led mathematicians to discover a radical new kind of space that had hitherto seemed abhorrent and impossible."

Daina Taimina, a visiting professor at Cornell University, has come up with a way to translate the geometrical concept of hyperbolic space into tangible artifacts using crochet.
By increasing the stitches in each row, Tainima is able to represent the space where parallel lines run wild.
An explanation of the artifactured concepts is on display at The Institute For Figuring.



parallel lines in hyperbolic space


hyperbolic space pseudosphere