SubSub blog

A couple of posts on some good looking digital stuff about recently…

Alexander McQueen - continuing his blurring between technology and fashion - recently used a Musion Eyeliner System to materialise a life sized hologram of Kate Moss in the center of the show.

The system, as used by Gorillaz in their stage ‘appearances’, simulates the 3d by using a projector, a mirror and a form of semi transparent foil that sits at 45% degrees to the viewers. It’s a modern version of an old technique known as “Peppers Ghost” used in stage shows.

The output looks beautiful, particularly when crafted by Alexander (and containing Kate). Have a look for yourself:

Another long break between posts, sorry. It’s always frustrating, because these long breaks normally mean we’ve been involved in even more stuff to blog about. The vicious circle continues until eventually we’ll be drowned in our own adventures. With that in mind we better get on with it…

Been in London over the last few days at the Free Range graduate shows. We went down to see the Bournemouth New Media course, but also had a good look at the other goings on.

The Bournemouth show (i Heart Play) did live up to it’s title, many of the pieces including gaming to some degree. The pieces ranged from mediocre to damn interesting. They included sonic controlled interfaces, interactive films, alternative reality games, API mash ups, and some good old html and flash interfaces. The show was well coordinated, and felt coherent.

Although no animators/designers stood out, a number of people seemed to know their coding, so I hope to get them working with us at SubSub.

The Brighton Graphics and Illustration courses were also on show. Their work was exceptional in places, with some very powerful graphical pieces. As always it was highly ‘fine art’ influenced, with a conceptual feel throughout, therefore difficult to comprehend employing outside of illustration work.

Epson had a huge show on, with almost 120 students on show, split between new media and graphics. The interactive work was limited, with only a couple of pieces to note, and even these were reasonably unoriginal (although, the guy who had created one of them was particular nice, so good luck to him). There was someone playing with the Wii Remote API, but that wasn’t working when I was about.

The rest of the ‘new media’ course had some great design though, with one guy in particular shining out as skilled with a massive body of work. The rest was mainly motion based, of pretty good quality.

All in all a good show, but I’m disappointed with the lack of digital/interactive courses this year. Perhaps we should move next years exhibition to Free Range and put on the digital stuff?

The guys at Encounters have provided us with some open air entertainment. Personally I think open air cinemas are great (not quite as good as drive-in’s but close).

It’s all free, so go!

I recently noticed the guys from SITA working away beside our office cleaning up the graffiti. Nothing new, we’ve got a lot of graffiti/street art (delete as appropriate) around Stokes Croft… but what was interesting was they were leaving a particular stencil, and just painting over the crappy tags and badly drawn scribbles.

Now I’d never thought of this before, but it makes sense in a city sporting street artists such as Xenz, Sickboy, Ghostboy and of course Banksy. Particularly when their pieces are starting to become hugely valuable items. Would you want to be the one who’s just painted over a piece worth over 100k?

So, we’re left with an art conscious cleaning service. From disposer to curator; a lovely transition I think. Respect to the firm for having the foresight to at least think about it.

I’ve got a backlog of posts that just keeps seeming to get longer, with some sitting in my todo’s for at least a year. So in an attempt to not let them pass here’s a quick hit of some of the great and the good:

An attempt at digital pixels. Not quite as beautiful as Daniel Rozin’s work but still pretty interesting (the end goals are different anyhow). It’s nice how the whole system talks to each other, and ‘pixels’ can be added and removed as needed. Created with Processing.

Zopa.com has already had a reasonable amount of interest in the press. I originally saw it when checking out what the guys at Poke had been up to recently. Looking into it it’s a very interesting idea. Basically matching up lenders and borrowers. I’m interested to see whether it’ll get popular enough to get Carol Vorderman of the TV adverts in the morning.

This guy seems to have far too much fun making things such as paint ball and zombie mini guns. The best thing is he then goes to work and does stuff like this.

To balance out the mini-guns and zombies: this next site is somewhere between the ‘you too can look like Kate Moss’ pages and a MIT grads dissertation. Like.com utilizes image recognition techniques to find similar items within a number of online stores stock.

Finally, Matt Biddulph at hackdiary has created a meeting of our favorite Phy/Dig interface Arduino and Second Life. Some basic workings out are included so we can all get on with it ourselves. The potential for real world/ virtual world interfaces is massive.

A couple of recent posts from Hack-A-Day, one’s totally pointless the other damn useful.

Useful first: a link out to Rfidiot.org where Adam has been spreading his knowledge of RFID tagging, reading, setting etc… He also provides some Python scripts to help you do the same.

It’s not the easiest to get your head round, but seems to be a pretty comprehensive guide to plugging into that info. If you are looking for similar open source style info on RFID tags you should also check out www.radioactivehq.org.

And now for the stupid, heating your coffee using a big f**k off laser. Boys with toys eh?