dog food

I’m really enjoying the ‘Downfall’ parodies (and the surrounding drama, and the parodies of the drama).

I was in Istanbul recently, which was great; the Hagia Sophia, the Basilica Cistern, the Spice Bazaar, wonderful friends, and this incredible butter ball.

thanks to Glenn for the photo.

Tomás Saraceno, Space Elevator II (working title), 2009. © Tomás Saraceno

Via we-make-money-not-art

My plan to turn the Brunswick Secondary College maintenance shed into a GIANT smoke ring generator has failed – not the slightest hint of a smoke ring formed at the 2m diameter hole we (the year 7’s and myself) constructed at the end of the 5m long shed.

And so, despite my best intentions, the Artist in Residency project looked likely to end, ‘not with a bang but a whimper’.

This just aint going to cut it – my ego desperately needs the admiration of a half dozen year 7s.

Enter Plan B.

A ply and pine contraption I whipped up over the break. This will be disassembled then reassembled by the year 7s.

But, before that happens I thought I’d better test it.

Filling the tub…

Firing…

and you can just make out the resulting smoke ring before it slams into the wall.

Yeah, redemption is imminent.

thanks to Simon for the link.

I’ve been making smoke ring generators with students from Brunswick Secondary College. They are based on the one below.

I was talking with the kids today about making a huge smoke ring machine, maybe using the maintenance shed for the ‘tub’. YouTube offered this up for inspiration.

Last time I looked Quartz Composer wouldn’t talk to anything, so I find this project from Jay pretty amazing. It’s using the open source Peggy LED board from Evil Mad Science and the Arduino (also open source). More videos here, and Jay is sharing his code here.

I just fell down the rabbit hole that is Nikola Tesla; inventor of radio, AC current distribution, remote controlled vehicles, and the DEATH RAY (actually Tesla called it the “Peace Ray” but that didn’t catch on). There’s a bit of controversy about whether it actually existed, most sane people think not, most nut bags with an internet connection and a basic grasp of HTML think oh-yeah, and a whole lot more (the above image comes from the Virgin Mary’s End-Time Prophecies page – they claim Soviet use of the weapon in Afghanistan). For a more lucid account of the technology you could read this wiki article (from the metafictional narrative Against the Day). Here they recount a story linking Tesla’s Death Ray to a 1908 explosion in Siberia that destroyed five hundred thousand square acres of land – alternatively, this destruction could be attributed to a meteor impact.

But it all gets slightly more believable when you see pictures of Tesla’s tower at Wardenclyffee Laboratory (below – more images here), or watch the informative video from Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.

The effects you get from even a small Tesla Coil are impressive (photo from David Rieben).

I think I want one. And not for any ‘death ray’ purposes, although there is this one guy who keeps dumping his rubbish in my front yard…

If you’ve seen the Radiohead video for House of Cards you probably know it was ‘filmed’ using a collection of 3D laser scanners. What you may not know is that Radiohead have released the scan data and Processing code used to produce the video. What would anyone want with that? Well you could use it to laboriously recreate the clip in lego. Click through to the YouTube page to watch the high quality version.

I was googling E.A.T. – Experiments in Art and Technology when I came across this collaboration for the Expo ’70 Pepsi Pavilion in Osaka, Japan. The outside of the building was covered by a water vapour cloud sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya. The dome shaped objects in the foreground are six-foot high moving sculptures by Robert Breer, they travel at less than 2 feet per minute and emit sound.

The interior skin of the building consists of a giant Mylar bubble, producing a spherical mirror effect. The bubble was inflated by a slight vacuum created between the Mylar skin and the buildings outer structure. Follow the link, click on the image thumbnails, be amazed.