It’s called g-speak. Too bad that dude isn’t as hot as Tom Cruise.
Archive for the ‘technology’ Category
Oblong’s Minority Report OS
Saturday, November 15th, 2008Our New Toy
Thursday, October 30th, 2008
Check out our new toy at the studio: a Universal Laser Systems laser cutter: PLS 6.60, with a 60 watt laser and air assist with an 18″ x 32″ bed. Yumm.
Bucky Fuller
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
Buckminster Fuller’s exhibition at the Whitney is fantastic. On the first floor is the Dymaxion car, which, cool as it is, is surpassed by the beautiful technical drawings for it.
The fourth floor is where the main exhibit is, and there are some incredible drawings and models of experiments and projects of ranging scales. There were quite a few projects and many drawings, sketches as well as footage of Fuller that I had never seen before, and it was truly a treat.
I left the exhibition feeling a bit uneasy though: there has to be some level of insanity in someone that has such faith in technology as the savior. His completely ‘technocratic-utopian’ view seems in a sense harmless (even naive), yet it displaces man so swiftly.
Don’t miss the fantastic model and drawings of the floating city, the incredible sketch for the World Fair and his geometric models.
Radiohead’s House of Cards
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
For their latest video from the album In Rainbows, Radiohead has gone super hi tech, by not using cameras at all, and instead relying on Geometric Informatics and Velodyne Lidar (?!) technologies … I won’t try to explain it in my own words, so I’ll just quote from the Pitchfork article quoting from the press release:
“The Geometric Informatics scanning system employs structured light to capture detailed 3D images at close proximity, and was used to render the performances of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, the female lead, and several partygoers. The Velodyne Lidar system uses multiple lasers to capture large environments in 3D, in this case 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute, capturing all of the exterior scenes and wide party shots.”
via [Pitchfork]
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008A passage from Manuel DeLanda’s book “War in the Age of Intelligent Machines” (1991), which I’m almost done with.
Almost without exception, secret service organizations have thrived in times of turbulence and, conversely, have seen their power vanish as turmoil slows. For this reason, they survive by inciting social turbulence, spreading rumors and inventing imaginary enemies, fifth columns, and bomber and missile gaps. They need to keep society in constant alert, in a generalized state of fear and paranoia, in order to sustain themselves. This has led to the development of a gigantic “espionage industry, ” whose entire existence is based on a bluff few governments dare to call:
Holographic Display
Sunday, June 29th, 2008The ICT graphics lab at USC has brought us a step closer to holograms. By using spinning mirrors, DLP projections and as the article puts it, ‘very precise math’ they have created a 3d image that stays in place, allowing different points of view as well as occlusion.
Now they’ll just have to build R2D2.
Read the Wired article here .
Buckminster Fuller
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
The New Yorker has an interesting article on Buckminster Fuller’s vision and (failed) projects, soon to be on display at The Whitney Museum of Art here in NYC. It poses the question of WHAT is it exactly that is relevant -yet so hard to pin down- of Fuller’s trajectory.
Read the article here.
Reusing PC heat
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008Heat produced by computers has long been one of those byproducts that are, more often than not, vented to the exterior and therefore wasted. A computer center in Switzerland is reusing the heat produced by its equipment to warm up a town pool. The town payed for part of the system to reroute the heat but it’ll continue to use it or free. A cool symbiotic relationship that will probably become a model.
Read the Wired article here.
Flock
Saturday, March 1st, 2008
I’ve just come to discover Flock a new social web browser which is based on the Firefox technology. It allows you to have all those apps you don’t really want to have so easily accesible at hand: Flickr, Facebook, Picassa, RSS feeds, Del.icio.us, Twitter, etc etc etc. The can all be opened within your browser window and, heres the coolest (for me at least) you can post directly to your own blog through the web interface. It has a bunch other cool features that I’m just starting to check out.
This is the Beta release (it’s been very recently launched) but it still handles very well. This will be my first blog post directly through it so I’ll let you know how that worked out.
Design and the Elastic Mind
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
[flv:http://www.erratica.us/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/designandelasticmind.flv designandelasticmind.jpg 352 288]
I made it earlier today to the MoMA preview of Design and the Elastic Mind. I couldn’t really take enough time to look around, but it is definitely an impressive selection of interesting work..
I’ll post something more complete once I make it back to the museum and actually get to spend some time in the exhibition. But for now, here are some low quality phone pics for now.