“Hardly anyone knows that a secret tunnel runs deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean. In May 2008, more than a century after it was begun, the tunnel will finally be completed. Immediately afterwards, an extraordinary optical device called a Telectroscope will be installed at both ends which will miraculously allow people to see right through the Earth from London to New York and vice versa.”
I hope I’m not bursting anyone’s bubble when I reveal that the Telectroscopes (designed by artist and inventor Paul St George) are connected not by a tunnel but by fiber optic cabling, and an HD camera and projector on either end provide live streaming video. But who really cares, you can still look in one end of this device in New York and see out the other in London. You’ll find one end next to the Brooklyn Bridge, and the other across the pond, next to Tower Bridge.
Interestingly, the concept for this device has been around for over a century. Read about its origins, and check out a picture from one of the apertures, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
Have you ever had a picture that you thought you could stare at all day long? If you truly wanted to stare at a picture that long, why not have it turned into wallpaper for a room in your house? While I wouldn’t recommend turning photographs of people (that would just be creepy), a landscape might look cool in certain situations.
The price is a bit steep for what you get. They’ll charge you around $90 per square meter. While that might not sound too bad for a piece of art, the inks are only meant to last for 3 years without fading. If I’m going to spend that much money on wallpaper, I’m going to want it to last a lot longer than that.
Even if your fridge is already energy-efficient and eco-friendly, here’s one more way to make it truly ‘green.’ Originally designed by Richard Hutten to be used on the office ceilings of the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, these plastic leaves have a small magnet at the base allowing you to attach them to any metal surface. Besides using them to spruce up a filing cabinet or other metal faced appliances, they’d also come in handy for hiding that rusted out Chevy sitting in the backyard you keep meaning to ‘fix-up’ one of these days.
The Leave Magnets have supposedly been put into production by an office furniture maker called Gispen, but I can’t find any information about them on the company’s website.
I’m something of an artist, I don’t do anything fancy, mostly just pencil and ink sketches. However, this gives me an appreciation for art, though most of what I have hanging in my house is related to either gaming or comics. Here is one piece of gaming artwork that I would definitely have hanging up.
The Tetris Mirror is my favorite kind of art, one that is not only appeasing to the eye, but is also useful. The mirror consists of thirteen interlocking pieces that you can arrange in any fashion that you like. Now if only there was some information regarding pricing and availability.
We’ve taken some totallysweetpicturesofothergalaxies, but it’s kinda hard to get a decent image of our own Milky Way… There’s just no good place to stand and point the camera. This 12cm glass cube contains a pint sized model of our home galaxy. It’s not just an abstract rendering; there are 80,000 individual points, representing the relative positions of 80,000 real stars, based on data from Japan’s National Astronomical Observatory.
According to Monty Python’s Galaxy Song, our galaxy contains a hundred billion stars, which is a far cry from the mere eighty thousand represented here. On the upside, this model will set you back 1 yen (just under a penny) per star, so if it was more accurate, you’d be paying upwards of a billion dollars instead of the $800 or so it actually costs. Oh, and before you start complaining that the galaxy is off center, this model is geocentric: Earth is in the middle. Yep, we’re kinda off in the middle of nowhere. Humbling, huh?
This automated broom is one of those occasions where someone asks you to do something tedious, and your clever solution to getting out of doing any work is so awesome that no one really cares about how crappy a job it actually does. It’s kind of like when you’re told to cut the lawn and you tether a self-powered mower to a stake with a rope. You end up with a perfect circle of cut grass, and the edges of the yard completely untouched.
Designed by Servet Kocyigit as an art piece way back in 2005, Blue Side Up as it’s oddly called is great for people who only end up with a thin strip of dirty floors throughout their home. Also, you have to be content with never being able to close the doors in the rooms where the broom sweeps, and the fact that the broom itself appears to be made out of human hair. Kind of gross.
Here’s a unique piece that explores the idea of how artwork would respond if it knew we were looking at it. The Opto-Isolator sculpture is a black box with a robotic, human-sized blinking eye in the dead center. It responds to the gaze of whoever’s staring at it with a series of “psychosocial eye-contact behaviors” like looking the viewer directly in the eye, studying the viewers face, looking away coyly if it’s stared at for too long and even blinking exactly one second after you do.
While the photos themselves are pretty creepy, you’ll want to check out the YouTube video showing the Opto-Isolator in motion. At times it can be frighteningly realistic, even if the blinking action sounds louder than a clapboard.
The Opto-Isolator was designed and built by Golan Levin and Greg Baltus, and was recently exhibited at the Bitforms Gallery in New York.
From the Coolest Things I’ve Seen All Week deparment comes this “digital sculpture,” called Cloud. It was commissioned by British Airways for their new luxury lounges in Heathrow Airport in London, and was constructed by the Troika art and design studio. Cloud is 5 meters long and is covered with 4,638 of those little flip dot things that you still occasionally see in train station displays. The dots flip back and forth between black and reflective silver, creating both visual patterns and a nifty rainstick sound.
So, how many firstborns will it take to get one of these installed on my ceiling?
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