If you don’t have kids at home, there’s a good chance your refrigerator is devoid of finger paintings, report cards and other such decorations. But that doesn’t mean it has to be completely bare. Magnetic Pixels is an easy to use kit that comes with 1400 10mm x 10mm colored magnetic squares that can be used to create pixelated works of art. The magnets come in 16 different shades, but if you’re feeling a little uninspired you can download a handful of pre-made pixelated designs from their website to get you started.
Now according to the Magnetic Pixels site, the kits should be available from Kikkerland, but I can’t find any mention of them on their website.
I’ll be frank, this Self Reflecting Lamp, created by Oliver Shick, is a complete act of futility. It looks like a couple of Luxo lamps that were born as conjoined twins locked in an eternal struggle to free themselves.
But oddly enough, it looks like the lamp actually works, though it obviously doesn’t produce much usable light and it makes me wonder how exactly you’re supposed to change the bulbs. On top of that, I assume the black shades that are joined together must get incredibly hot without a reliable way to dissipate the heat from those bulbs. But I guess it’s a conversation piece right?… Right?…
Gazing at the heavens through most telescopes really only gives you a 2D image of what’s out there. And while you might get a good idea of just how many stars and other celestial objects are in the night sky, that 2D image just doesn’t convey the actual size and vastness of the universe in which we live. But the Humble Telescope, created by design studio ENESS, provides a different star gazing experience. While it might look and feel like a traditional telescope, inside the Humble there’s actually an interactive 3D simulation of the entire known universe that you can explore by simply pointing the telescope in any direction.
Not only does it provide a way to explore the stars no matter what time of day it is, but it also helps to remind us how amazing the universe really is.
I’m spending today at the ETech Emerging Technology Conference, and I just got back from a talk by Aaron Koblin. You might remember Aaron from his Sheep Market project, where 10,000 people were paid two cents each to draw “a sheep facing to the left” via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a service (that you can participate in!) that lets humans perform crowd computing in exchange for money. If you haven’t seen this project, it’s awesome, especially if you like sheep.
In his talk today, Aaron showed two other crowd sourced projects… One was an image of a hundred dollar bill composed of 10,000 individually drawn pieces. The other, in the video above, was a rendition of Daisy Bell, the first song ever sung by a computer and made famous in 2001 (the movie, so in 1968). Aaron’s version of Daisy Bell was sung (and accompanied) by a mix of 2,088 people singing one syllable each, when they had no idea what they were contributing toward, just that they would get paid six cents. It’s pretty remarkable.
So you got one of those useless fancy digital photo frames for Christmas, but do you really want to spend your day looking at photos of your family? Of course not! Thankfully Bandai is the first company to come to that realization, and their new Digital Living Gallery line of digital photo frames reflects that. Instead of a cheesy plastic frame, the LCD is surrounded by a traditional, and tasteful, wooden frame like you’d find on a painting. And since that would probably seem out of place while the frame was cycling through photos of your trip to Carlsbad Caverns, Bandai will be pre-loading the frames with highbrow content.
At launch, the Digital Living Gallery will be available in a Pierre-Auguste Renoir or a Vincent van Gogh version that each come with 30 high-quality digital versions of classical works from each artist. And Bandai will be selling SD cards with works from other artists as well, so you can continually expand your frame’s collection. While you’re not going to fool anyone into thinking that’s a real van Gogh you’ve got propped up on your desk, something like this would go a long way to classing-up your cubicle, once you get rid of all those Halo figures.
The Digital Living Frames will be available starting January 30th for about $580 (52,290 Yen) while the SD cards will sell for about $55 (4,980 Yen) each.
This post is syndicated with permission from GamerFront.net
I’ll admit to having some interesting pieces of gaming (or general geeky) art on my walls, but what I’m missing is something that pays tribute to the console that started it all (for me). Sure, I could track down an old poster featuring an NES title, or maybe a unique piece with a classic Mario theme, but I don’t think that would do it justice. No, what I need is an original NES cart inside of a shadowbox.
This wonderfully Photoshopped image of what you will probably get upon purchase really doesn’t look that great. Honestly, it doesn’t even look like a shadowbox. While I wouldn’t recommend dropping $80 on one of these, I think that you could probably make a pretty decent piece of art for 10-15 bucks with a trip to a hobby shop.
If you you’re the kind of person that is just fascinated by death, and enjoys making people wonder about the state of your mental health, then I’ve got the perfect lamp for you. Designer Marie Thurnauer has decided to provide the world with a way to not only end your life, but also with a way to keep your room nice and bright.
The 53-inch lighting fixture is technically a work of art, though I’m not quite sure I understand the point of such a piece. If you think that you ever might want to use the lamp for any purpose other than illuminating a room, I wouldn’t suggest buying it. Once you realize that you just spent over six thousand dollars on a lamp, you might be tempted to use the noose.
Unlike most pieces of functional artwork, the Seven Rats Table Light doesn’t seem to be making any sort of Statement and may just be weird for the sake of being weird. Designed by Ingo Maurer “and team” (whatever that means) the light sculpture is made of steel, gold, brass, and plastic cages which contain three black and four white rats (plastic rats, calm down), and the whole thing is lit from the bottom with a 50 watt halogen bulb.
Oh, wait. I know what this lamp-thing is all about. It’s so obvious, that’s why they don’t spell it out for you. Clearly, it symbolizes the subconscious obsession of the human race with subjugating nature to create a schism between mind and body that satisfies our materialist and consumerist super-egos while illustrating the conflict between self and other in the context of subliminal racial pressures via a visual exposition of our primal instincts through Plato’s cave allegory. It’s so simple.
No matter how incredibly deep the underlying meaning of this thing is, the $4680 cost means that it would be far, far cheaper to make this light fixture with real cages and real rats. And I bet if you connected all the cages and added some comfy hammocks, the rats (two perhaps, not seven) might even enjoy the setup. And you probably would enjoy it a lot more, too, having some fuzzy little ratties to keep you company instead of a really, really weird sculpture with (okay, I admit it) an incomprehensible meaning.
We featured Jason Freeny’s anatomy of a balloon dog in May of last year, and since then, he’s dissected gummi bears and now a Lego minifig to show us how they operate. I didn’t realize the little guys had fingers and toes under there. And a nose. It’s very cool, but am I the only one who also finds it vaguely disturbing…?
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By Andrew Liszewski
