Have a peek below at a video of both Zuckerberg and Choe collaborating on an image that still exists somewhere in some Facebook office in the world today. This video was filmed at the second Facebook campus and the paint was laid down inside 2007, where the stock options were eventually given over to Choe. Notice the simplicity that Zuckerberg adds and Choe just takes hold of and shoots off into outer space:

The reason I say somewhere in some Facebook office is that the original two locations have had some or all of their paintings lifted and transferred out to other Facebook and Facebook-related locations around the world. These paintings sit in fabulous pieces across the world now, and you’d be lucky to happen upon one. Check this example out sitting near a lovely Facebook house below it:

You can get a full account of the Facebook adventures Choe has had in his own matrix of photos taken from different sources in his own blog at Blogspot. And know this: though other investors have found themselves suddenly rolling in dough now that Facebook has gone public, there’s no greater way to spend that cash than the $18,000 bottle of alcohol he posted on his Facebook page this past week. Remember that!

The Trafalgar Sun is 30,000 times bigger than a soccer ball and has a surface area of 200 meters-square. Consisting of orange material surrounding a multi-lamp array, it produces the equivalent of 60,000 regular lightbulbs and sucks up 210,000W in the process.

In this second video, exactly how the Trafalgar Sun was made is shown. If you’re looking for a more affordable way to battle SAD, check out the Philips goLITE BLUE which we reviewed last month; a whole lot smaller and dimmer, but a fair bit cheaper too.

This project has no future plans to become a mass-made or distributed product, but in that the video you’re seeing is made so well what you’ll not possibly miss the point, it’s made wonderful from start to finish. As the tree’s years rings are analyzed for their strength, says the creator, so too are they analyzed for their thickness and rate of growth, and turned into a song that describes it all. Have a peek a the manifesto for this project here:

A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.

This project is made up of a modified turntable, a camera, acrylic glass, vvvv (a multipurpose programmable toolkit), veneer, and of course a computer. The whole thing rings in at 90x50x50 cm and again, there is only one. The artist worked with or would otherwise like to thank Land Salzburg, Schmiede, Pro-ject Audio, Karla Spiluttini, Ivo Francx, vvvv, and Rohol. Get your tissues out, lovers of nature, this is going to get messy for your eyeballs.

[via Traubeck]

The exhibit is part art display and part science with the bones of these mythological creatures put on display for people to check out as if they were real. The centaur skeleton you see in the picture here is called the Centaur of Tymfi. There is also a skull of a griffin on display along with a skull of a cyclops as well.

The centaur skeleton was designed by Bill Willers from the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. Willers is a zoologist and sculptor. Museum director Richard White says that the exhibit looks at how folklore could possibly hide scientific stories.

[via USA Today]

Co-developed with Planar, the two existing prototypes come in sizes of 21.9″ by 33.9″ with an aspect ratio of 1:1.5 and 48″ by 27″ with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Much like tablets, the displays have ambient light sensors and also sensors for motion, meaning they have the ability to turn on and off by themselves, conserving power. Also borrowing from our tablets is Samsung’s goal of bringing a market-like service to the panels where users could search for new art to display and purchase it right from the device.

Samsung intends for this to be a new market of displays. They claim artist are eager to start making works with the new technology, and their goal is to develop this into a new medium. There is no information on pricing available at this time, however it’s safe to assume it will be much pricier than a standard LCD TV set. Samsung says the first SM’ART Gallery Panels will be available sometime in mid-2012.

[via Chip Chick]

Blair has also recently been honored via a lecture by the name of “Mary Blair’s World of Color – A Centennial Tribute” as given at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences by a collection of big contemporary names. On the panel for this lecture were Eric Goldberg who was a supervising animator for Disney’s “Aladdin” and the director of “Pocahontas,” Peter Docter who was the director of the movies “Monsters, Inc” and “Up,” and many more. This was not a woman who was destined to be forgotten.

Included in the gallery below is a small collection of Mary Blair works, most of them from Disney films. This sort of painting and illustration was to influence generations of artists and remains a staple in illustration teachings in design colleges today. Truly a master of her tools was Blair, and Google is good to note it! For more Mary Blair work, head to http://magicofmaryblair.com/ where there’s loads of prints to purchase and colors to look upon.

We’ve seen digital pens that can turn a notebook into a digitizer before – Livescribe’s smartpens leap to mind – but Wacom is keen to underline the differences between the Inkling’s focus and that of other products. Whereas Livescribe’s pens are intended to track a mixture of handwriting, brief sketches and other mixed content, the Inkling is dedicated to drawing.

In that respect, the promise is simple: clip the compact receiver box to the top of your notepad – it’ll handle up to A4 sized paper – and power on with the left button. A combination of infrared and ultrasound are used to track the special battery-powered pen, which means you’ll need line-of-sight between the nib and the receiver, but beyond that it’s a case of sketching away to your heart’s content. What makes it particularly clever is the layer button; tap that and the Inkling stores your subsequent sketches to a new layer (you can save as many as will fit in the receiver’s 2GB of storage, each a space-efficient vector file).

Wacom Inkling demo:

Those layers become useful when you hook the receiver up – via microUSB – to your computer. The new sketches are automatically sucked into Wacom’s Sketch Manager app, and you can then see the entire drawing as well as hide individual layers. It’s even possible to watch an animation of the whole drawing process, though you can’t currently export that as a video file; Wacom told us they are considering that functionality for a later upgrade. What you can do, however, is snip sections of one layer out into a new layer, isolating different parts of the picture.

From there it’s a case of exporting to one of the supported apps – Photoshop and Illustrator are the most likely candidates (both CS3 or later), but Autodesk SketchBook Pro and SketchBook Designer (2011 or later) are possible too – whereupon all the layer information is carried over and you can edit, color and generally tweak as normal. Quality is surprisingly high, with smooth curves even at high levels of zoom.

It’s not entirely perfect. The included carry-case/charging box feels a bit thrown-together, though it does at least have space for the (standard) black ink refils, USB cable, both receiver and pen, and allow you to charge each from a single USB hook-up. Wacom tells us that this is still pre-production hardware, so things will hopefully be more sturdy by the time the Inkling hits shelves.

Still, even as the merest amateurs of artists, we weren’t surprised when Wacom said it had been inundated with interest after announcing the Inkling last month. The simplicity of the capturing process and the ease with which even complicated sketches can be later managed is brilliant, and we can imagine that “proper” artists would be able to use the Inkling as a real tool rather than a gimmick. The $199 price-tag when the Inkling goes on sale imminently could be the biggest block to ownership, though if you’ve ever found yourself wishing you could keep whatever you doodled in the margins of your notebook it may still be worth it.

The tower is 10-feet tall as I said, and it has 65,000 pieces. One of the coolest touches on the building is that it has some colored brick on the side to make a pattern that looks like reflected skyline of the city. This mimics the shiny glass of the real building. The finished effect is really cool. I can only imagine how long it took the artist, Sean Kenney, to build this thing.

The building is on permanent display at the Chicago LEGO Store. You have to check out the artist’s website and see some of the things he has made from LEGO. The LEGO busts and photos are awesome. Apparently the build time was a full month at full-time, presumably 8-hours a day, along with two assistants.

[via Brothers Brick]

This little cutie is a pretty darn good replica of the original version which, believe it or not, is a whole lot bigger. As the artist shows, you don’t necessarily have to plop a drop of mixed alchol in there, you can use this little guy for everything from jellybeans to SD cards – or a single roll of film would work too. Can you imagine all the things you’d think of to drop in?

Then again, you could toss back a few shots of whiskey and go on a photo hunt, I suppose that wouldn’t be the worst idea should you remain safe on the jaunt. The best part about this entire situation is that the shot glasses are for sale, they’re inexpensive, and they come in a set of three. Just head over to the Awesomeness section at Photojojo and drop $18 for the win!

And don’t forget to pick up a set for your ol’ friend yours truly!

The artist is Agustina Woodgate and she takes the hair and makes it into little bricks to create the castles you see in the photos here. The two sculptures are from the artists “I Wanted to Be a Princess” collection. The castle made of bricks you see has 3,000 hairballs total. The work is called “Tower” and it stands four feet tall.

The other is called “Sandcastle” and it uses more of a freeform construction. It is intended to look like a sandcastle that is decaying. It’s the grossest one to me with all the loose hair at the base. It looks like some sort of royal wedding where hair and not hats are the big odd draw.

[via Inhabitat]

Over on deviantART you can download and print the parts you need to make the crazy Nyan Cat machine you see in the photo. As you turn the little paper crank the parts of the paper craft Nyan Cat move so you can pretend to be flying through space with the odd little creature. You have to print on thick A4 paper.

I will assume the thicker the better, this looks like a card stock project to me. The size of the page is 12cm x 10cm x 3cm. Once you get the parts printed, all you need to do is cut out the parts and then scratch the back of the fold lines with a cutter. Once assembled you have your little piece of uber geek art to play with.

[via TheDailyWhat]

The show has a slew of customized Pioneer CDJ-2000 digital music players that were used as the canvas for the art. The art show is set up to benefit the VH1 Save The Music Foundation. Artists include BT, Bob Haro, George Thompson, Jesse Graves, Joe Hahn, Man One, Ritzy Periwinkle, ROSTARR, Steve Aoki, The Crystal Method, Tommy Lee & DJ Aero as well as Victor “Marka27″
Quiñonez.

The art ranges from 80′s style splatter paint to my personal favorite, the LEGO version. The LEGO version has all the buttons and scratch wheel replaced with LEGO bricks and plates and it is really cool. I also like the turntable with the small keyboard at the bottom and the dual guitar necks on the sides. Check out the source to see all the custom gear.

Tresset built the robot arm with loot from a grant for research. Tresset said that he made the bot sloppy and clumsy to “touch people.” I’d think it was cool even if the portraits were more precise. Still, Paul the robot arm draws faces with an ink pen better than I can. Future iterations of the robot will have software that allows the bot to view the drawings it makes and then improve them.

This arm reminds me more than a little of this portrait game at Chuck E. Cheese that my kids like that draws your photo with a pen rather than printing. The bot is constructed using cheap servomotors rather than industrial grade sorts that would allow for extreme precision. Check out the video below to see Paul in action and skip to 1:30 to see the actual drawing start.

[via Fastcodesign]

Artist Chris Burden has constructed the coolest Hot Wheels track that I have ever seen. From looking at the thing, I don’t see anything that might have come out of a Hot Wheels box. Even the track looks custom made to me. The kinetic sculpture is called Metropolis II and has 1,100 Hot Wheels cars that zip around the streets of the giant city continuously. Each of the little blurs you see in the photo are Hot Wheels cars that are roughly 2-inches long.

The artwork took the artist and a team of ten assistants four years to build and is installed in Burden’s studio. When my son saw this, he wanted to know if we could make on in his room. I know him, after the four-year construction process, he would walk through it like Godzilla and crush it.

[via Make]

Morrison calls the project the Beer Can Surfboard, which is exactly what it is. The cans used in the project were collected from a local bar and include Budweiser, Modelo, PBR, Rolling Rock, and Boddingtons Pub Ale cans. Morrison worked with surfboard maker Gary Seagraves on the project. I know nothing about surfboards other than what I learned watching the new Hawaii Five-O so I’m not sure if this board uses normal build materials or not. The cans appear to be inside some sort of clear resin.

The board is long at 6’2″ and uses a rocket fish design with two fins and a swallow tail. I wonder if they have actually tired the board out on the waves to see if it works. It looks really cool, but I wonder how comfortable it would be to stand on. It looks like the resin follows the curve of the cans so the board has ripples like a pool float would. This is a cool example of recycling trash into something green and useful.

[via TreeHugger]

The room the artist Marek Tomasik built is 5m x 4m x 4.5m and it has a bunch of space between the parts making the walls see though. It’s a bit creepy and you will get no privacy. It would be perfect for a geek office though. I wonder how long it took the guy to build the room with all these parts. It appears the roof has an opening so you can get natural light in.

It sort of reminds me of what the inside of HAL looked like too. I keep seeing a steering wheel in some of these photos too. I’m thinking not all of the parts came out of a computer. Nevertheless, this is a very interesting room even if some won’t consider it art.

[via Geekosystem]

The case is beautiful, and has antique claw feet, copper keys, matching antiqued keyboard and mouse, and turns on and off via an antique style clock winding key. Very custom and very intricately handcrafted, the creation is a perfect combination of wood, glass, metal, and even some modern electronics. Currently only available in PC, Nagy said he might be willing to install a Mac OS for select enthusiasts.

The PC in the video is an HP ZT1000 laptop, but Nagy said he would most likely build newer units using a Lenovo Netbook or possibly something similar. But this is obviously more a work of art than a laptop. Anyone interested in this device is probably not concerned about benchmark results. There are other case mods on the market, but this takes it to a whole new level.

[via Datamancer]

Those are cases of beer in bottles. Considering Germany is the home of Oktoberfest, I am not surprised this passes for art. The artist is Cyprien Gaillard and his piece was meant to illustrate the point “Preserving a monument goes hand in hand with destroying it.” The most important bit for fans of the brewski may well be this; the pyramid was made from cases of Efes beer in bottles that was imported from Turkey.

The boxes formed the steps of the pyramid and people at the museum were cut loose to climb the pyramid and open the boxes, then get hammered. From the after shots in the gallery, it looks like they did a very good job. One thing about this bothers me. There was free beer at a museum, people were encouraged to drink their fill, and there are hoards of unopened cases left in that pyramid. Add that to the fact that there are no reports of riots sparked by what football team was the best of who would win the F1 championship this year and I call BS.

[via Fastcodesign]

The installation is on display at Lydgalleriet in Bergen, Norway, will be on display through June 5, and has 138 prepared DC motors. Each of those DC motors has what appears to be a wire arm running from it and the wire is crammed inside a cotton ball on the opposite end. The installation is huge and looks like a curved wall of cubbyholes made of cardboard boxes. It’s interesting to see all the motors moving about with the white cotton balls dancing around.

The balls in the video close ups look more like ping-pong balls to me. The sound it makes would probably drive you crazy after a while. I feel bad for the museum workers that have to be around the installation all day. I wonder how long it took the artist to create and set up the whole thing. It looks very complex. The upside to working in cardboard is that the material is recyclable.

[via Design-Milk]

The video attached here is nothing but a commercial for the drink, in reality, even though it doesn’t show the energy drink. You do see the Starts with V slogan though. This contraption is a giant paintball cannon on wheels. The works is mounted on the back of a truck and when the operator pushes a button, all the paint balls fly out at one time.

The truck is parked very close to a wall and when it pulls away, you see the paintball portrait of a yellow man that looks very pixel art falling from the top of a building. That yellow character reminds me more than a little of SpongeBob SquarePants. If someone tired this in real life, they would end up in the company of some nice Homeland Security agents.

[via Colossal]

Instead, he recorded himself using legitmate posix kill commands in an emacs eshell. There are also icosahedron and dodecahedron fireworks, tweaking exponential functions for make for “gooey” holographic heads, and more.

Apps used included various Adobe tools, Cinema 4D, and then custom code in C++ using OpenFrameworks and wxWidgets. If you’ve ever wondered about the processes behind CGI then it makes for an interesting read – even if you didn’t particularly like Tron:Legacy itself.

[via spurgeonblog]

In order to create a visualization of the WiFi terrain, the artists created a 4 meter tall pole attached with lights that lit up according to a location’s WiFi signal strength. Then using long exposure photography, they were able to capture the cross sections of a network’s signal strength as the pole was moved across a landscape.

The resulting images are like cross sections of the WiFi signal topography materialized in the actual landscape. Having photographed these topographies in various locations, they noticed enormous differences in the way networks spilled out from large institutions versus, say, an old apartment building and that the behavior of the network very much depended on the architecture and how the city around it is built.

[via YourBan]

The aggressive looking tank measures in at 4.5 x 3.2 x 2.5 meters, but unfortunately it doesn’t actually work. No, this is more of an oversized ornament for the particularly avid Transformers fan; it won’t reconfigure into an evil robot, either.

Still, as impressive art-pieces go, we’ve a soft spot for anything that looks like it could bring down an F-22 while simultaneously giving you tetanus.

[via Cloned In China]

In an interview with the blog Another Limited Rebellion, Valero said: “I love to improve 6” super-articulated action figures. I have an engineer’s mentality, so nothing is ever perfect enough. So I am big on tweaking and at time breaking and rebuilding toys. The use of found items is based on what is available to me out here. Slowly, I have amassed more resources like paint and hobby tools. Assemblage has really grown on me to the point I will continue to build from found items.” Continue after the cut to see more of his super-fantastic action figures.

Building the action figures has helped him to interact and connect with the local people, he says.

Valero’s work is for sale in his Etsy store, with most items around $10-$20. You can also see more photos of his work on his Flickr stream.

[via TreeHugger]

The camera takes a picture every 60 seconds, and the images are sent to a web site as well as being projected on screens at a museum in Doha, Qatar. Bilal said he was determined to continue with the project, and hopes that once he heals, a lighter camera can be attached. Meanwhile, he has the camera tied to the back of his neck with a string, and it is still feeding images to the website. The images we have seen so far look to be curtains.

So why is he doing this? The whole thing is a performance, and “With the performance comes endurance. But also it’s a commitment. And I didn’t feel that strapping something around my neck would be the same way I’m committed to the project as mounting it to the top of my head.”, Bilal said.

Bilal fled Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991, and lived in refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. He says he wished he had a record of the places he left behind. He also wants to slow life down and call attention to the present. “Most of the time, we don’t live in the places we live in,” he said. “We don’t exist in the city we exist in. Perhaps physically we exist, but mentally we are somewhere else.” Admirable, but this seems a very painful way of going about it.

Bilal also says that the project points to a future where communication devices will become part of our bodies.

[via PC News]
from The Chronicle of Higher Education

Bilal is currently carrying the camera by strapping it to the back of his neck, where it continues to beam out pictures to both a website and to a physical exhibition in Qatar. However, he claims to be “determined to continue with it” and – when the surgery wound has healed – will be looking to mount a lighter camera and continue the year-long project.

[via PopSci]

But wait, didn’t I title this post with an additional tattoo location? Yes! Carrion’s plan for the future is a tattoo right across his forehead. Undeniably the most devoted fan to a wireless company we’ve ever seen. Why would this man do such a thing? He’s “just a really, really big fan of Verizon Wireless.” As far as compensation for being a walking billboard for life, Carrion notes “Verizon probably spends millions in advertising and marketing every year, I’m not doing this to get money, but sponsoring my tattoo would be a relatively cheap way to increase brand exposure, and I wouldn’t turn down any compensation.”

He goes on to note that his upcoming forehead tattoo needs to happen to secure a future where he says “the logo will be in front of all my friends and anyone I run into on a daily basis.” Take a peek at the video for real, factual proof of this wild situation.

[Via IntoMobile]

Although this would be an amazingly simple sort of bookshelf to produce and sell in hipster shops across the USA, Eatock has only produced two of these, and both times for installations. This particular one you see above is host to 75 books that were, every single one of them, used as research material that informed the art show this project was included in, Book Show, Eastside Projects, all of them owned by the show’s curator James Langdon.

MDF 1220mm long x 300mm deep x 18mm thick, two metal brackets, 75 books – take a peek on Eatock’s portfolio page for a full list of the books used (if you want to recreate it yourself, I suppose.)

[Via Daniel Eatock]

According to the seller, it was quite a bit of work to figure out who Banksy really is. “I have uncovered [Banksy's] identity by matching up the prices of his sold pieces to corresponding tax records. I will reveal no more details… I give you 100 percent assurance that it is most certainly the full name of the street artist known as ‘Banksy.’” This actually isn’t the first time that Banksy’s true identity has been offered up on eBay, but that original auction was pulled because eBay said the seller wasn’t offering up a tangible item.

This time around, though, the seller was offering up a piece of paper with a name on it. That’s a tangible item, so there’s still a question swirling around why eBay would pull this latest bid. The seller started the sale at $3,000, and it was pulled after 36 bids, with a whopping $999,999 as the final bid. You can see The Simpson’s opening Banksy created below, if you’re unfamiliar with the creation, or just want to see it again.

[via GearLog]

This board is made of molded plywood and has foam and leather upholstered to the top. Although it’s made for the office, I imagine the goofiest of ladies and men would have an alright time skating barefoot with this pillow of boards. Don’t fall off though, I’ve done such a dare and it doth hurt quite mightily. I’ve also skated around campus way back in my college years, and having a board under my feet during class can be surprisingly soothing – supposing the wheels are properly greased.

Would you like your own “Secret” board by designer Carissa Carter? Too bad! This is an art project, and not made for mass consumption -unless of course you and enough other people contact her to make you one. All art projects are open to multiplication under the right kind of well-meaning duress.

[Via SnowFlyZone]

Video demo after the cut

The way the designers envisage it, buyers would order a bundle of Flutter in Pinhole cameras that would arrive with a pre-printed message inside. Each is sent flat: you pop the camera open, rip off the tape across the front, and expose both Polaroid frames simultaneously with the same image. A white pencil is included, which is rubbed over the back of the camera to develop the two shots.

After being cut down the middle, the cardboard unfolds to reveal one frame with the printed message and another with a blank space which you can use the pencil to write or draw on – then you leave the printed side with the subject of the photo, and take the other with you as a keepsake. Alternatively, it could be sent on as a postcard. No word on whether we’ll ever be able to buy them, however.

[via CNET]

Actually building the horse apparently took a lot longer than Chase expected, predominantly because he was striving for some sort of at least vaguely convincing accuracy. “The problem is/was that everyone knows what a horse looks like so I couldn’t cheat (much)” he told bookofjoe, adding “accuracy sucks.”

The 45-55lb beast stands 27-inches high at the shoulder, and is 27-inches long and 8-inches wide. We’re not exactly sure what Chase is going to do with it, though we’re sure it makes an imperious place to sit and watch TV from.

[via bookofjoe]

Video demo after the cut

It’s the handiwork of UK specialists Machine Shop, who were responsible for producing the Corian figures and integrating the three integrated computers and 96 microprocessors responsible for tracking moves and triggering speech. Kruger is known for her aggressive slogans printed in stark white text on a red background, a color theme that’s applied to the chess set’s case and to the color of the pieces themselves.

[Thanks Buster!]

The dude had the thumb size camera installed at a piercing shop and the camera is said to be about the size of a thumb. That plate on his head is larger than a thumb and appears to be a cover that the professor’s school requires him to use when teaching to protect the privacy of his students.

The camera will take a photo every minute to show what his life is like for the next year. I hope the dude remembers to put on the cover when he drops the browns off at the super bowl. The images will be viewable at the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art when the exhibit opens on December 30.

The accordion action of the watch creates a resonating chamber for the music. The case is 50mm wide and made in 18k rose and gray gold. Only 12 of the things will be made and you can see all of the gears and wheels that make the thing work through the clear face.

It comes in a wooden box that is designed to look like the Bastille Opera House in Paris. It’s ugly, but so cool and the craftsmanship in the piece is stunning. This is the rich steampunk geeks dream.

Via Boing Boing

Wafaa Bilal is an assistant professor of photography at the University of New York, and he is planning on doing something that many have never even dreamed of. As part of artwork called “The 3rd I,” Bilal is planning on installing a camera into the back of his skull. The camera, which would be installed for one year, would provide live streaming images to a museum in Qatar as part of the artwork. The idea behind the installation of the camera, and the resulting streamed images, is to “comment on the inaccessibility of time and the inability to capture memory and experience.”

Of course, there’s already concerns about privacy being aroused. Officials, and others at the University of New York, are suggesting that Bilal be forced to cover the camera with a lens cap, or turn it off altogether, while on New York University property. Luckily for the students and faculty at the University, Bilal has already agreed to cover the camera while on school property, thanks to a lens cap.

[via The Wall Street Journal]

Video demo after the cut

Technical details are sparse, but Charlie does say that it uses 600 feet of tubing and the pump can be carried in a backpack. The tubes themselves, meanwhile, are filled with a mixture of dyed water and air, while “the patterns are partially controlled by the onboard valves, and partially random.”

Unfortunately it sounds like while the dress is finished, so is Charlie’s enthusiasm:

“It has been a long labor to make this. I do hope you find something here, although I have become mostly unenchanted with the dress and video, despite my ambitions.  I don’t know if I was ever really captivated with it or rather just captive to it.  In any event, the Stockholm Syndrome is far gone.”

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/16871362[/vimeo]

[via BoingBoing]

Video demo after the cut

The motivation, he says, was to provide some degree of privacy without covering the whole window altogether.  Unfortunately, the end result has been to attract even more attention, since now people are coming over specifically to make the curtain dance around.

If you’d like to try it yourself, he’s made all the schematics and motion-tracking code available for download.

[via MAKE]

[Image credit: mandiberg]

In the first person shooter sequence, your character is an intelligence agent who has infiltrated a terrorist group. In the scene in question, you take part in a terrorist attack. You and a bunch of characters controlled by the computer enter an airport in Russia and start shooting. For the first few minutes, there is no resistance. You are shooting unarmed civilians. People scream and run away. People run up the escalator the wrong way. People fall and die. There’s a lot of blood.

It is, without a doubt, the most disturbing moment I’ve ever encountered in a video game. What’s most interesting, though, is that the scene is completely integral to the plot. If your character didn’t participate in this mission, the events that occur next would never happen.

How do you play such a level? What’s the moral imperative in video games? In some ways, there is none. These aren’t real people, obviously. It’s all just computer generated imagery on a screen. I could kill a million people in a video game. Would it be mass murder? Genocide? No, because nothing really happened.

Would I feel like I’m committing murder? That’s another question, and that depends on the game itself.

The first time I played through the CoD: MW2 level, I tried to avoid killing anyone. It’s possible for the first half of the level, but eventually security arrives, and in order to progress, you have to defeat the armed guards. It felt treasonous, almost, because I knew that my character is an undercover agent, and so the guards are really on my side. But you can’t continue the game without killing the opposition, and so that’s what I did.

The second time I played through the level, I killed everyone I could. I shot women in the head. I walked up to people lying on the floor, begging for mercy, and I shot them in the chest until they stopped moving. I used guns, grenades and knives. I tried to kill more people than the computer-controlled characters next to me.

I tried to enjoy the killing, but I couldn’t. It was very disturbing. I tried to embrace it, but the quality of the graphics, the voice acting and even the story itself all created a world that was just real enough to give me pause. I felt bad about killing innocent civilians in an airport terror attack, even though there was no killing, no civilians and no airport. It was all on screen, and it was all in my head.

That’s art. That is exactly what art is supposed to do. I started thinking about this when Ars Technica’s gaming writer, Ben Kuchera, tweeted that Call of Duty is as much art as Ico, a somewhat more abstract and fantastic video game title. Video games are often disparaged in the art world. Roger Ebert famously landed in hot water recently by penning a story claiming that video games can never be art. He has since made a qualified retraction of his original statement, but nonetheless, it seems that video games still get beaten down and taken to task in a way that traditional, more widely accepted artwork does not.

First, let me define my terms. I believe “art” is any creation that exists purely (or primarily) to elicit an emotional response. Any creation; any emotional response. This is a broad definition (if you didn’t realize, ), and this leaves the category wide open so that a wide range of things can be considered “art.” That’s fine with me. I would much rather argue about whether something is good art, or, even better, whether it’s successful art, than argue about whether it is art at all.

I have no interest in arguing about whether or not video games are, in fact, pieces of art. Some of them are, some are not. I think that the game itself has to elicit a human emotion for the game to be considered art. I don’t mean the act of winning the game, I mean the game itself. So, in my view, Tetris is not a work of art. It’s a fantastic game, one of the best ever created and a personal favorite (I am a Tetris demigod), but the happiness I get from Tetris, or any emotional response, comes from my own skill and success in playing the game. A game like “Call of Duty,” or “Bioshock,” or even “Guitar Hero” elicits a deeper emotional response that comes from being able to relate to the game. If the first two are more obvious, I would say “Guitar Hero” elevates itself to the level of art first because you are literally playing music, and music has always been considered art, but second because the game tries to help us imagine ourselves as skilled, successful musicians. Load up any Guitar Hero video on YouTube and tell me the kid playing complicated, 5-star riffs doesn’t envision himself a skilled musician. I’m not saying he’s right, I’m just saying that’s art.

While I was thinking about this article, a new controversy came up. Electronics Arts will release a new “Medal of Honor” title, another war-based first person shooter, set in today’s conflict zones. Though the story mode will have the player acting as an allied forces soldier, someone on our side, in other words, there is also a multiplayer mode. As Ars Technica quotes EA Games reps as saying: “if someone’s the cop, someone’s gotta be the robber.” To that end, half the players in a multiplayer round will be trying to kill the guys on ‘our side.’ Those opponents could play as “Taliban” soldiers. This has parents groups up in arms in the UK.

Why is it that parents groups always seem to come down on the side of censorship? Why do so-called parents groups try to get the government to mandate what my children can watch, so that my own entertainment has to be reduced to the level of what’s acceptable for my child?

In any case, there are two major flaws to this argument. First, nobody is actually becoming the Taliban. Just because you pick up a joystick and look through the virtual eyes of a Taliban fighter, that doesn’t mean you have anything in common with our enemies in Afghanistan. In a way, these parents groups are not only proving my original thesis that video games are in fact artwork, they are in fact showing just how successful the artwork has become. If the representation wasn’t so powerful, and if the games did not produce a real emotional response, would parents care? Would parents care if their children played games where they could act like a family of small frogs trying to cross a busy highway and getting killed by passing trucks? Of course not, because that was not a successful piece of artwork. But the more powerful representation elicits a more powerful emotional response. Art doesn’t make everyone happy; it isn’t supposed to.

Second, this unfortunately shows video games’ place at the bottom of artistic hierarchy. At the Academy Awards this year, the Best Supporting Actor award went to an actor who played an especially vicious and frightening Nazi. Did any parent group step up and say that Christoph Waltz should not have been allowed to portray a Nazi? Should we blacklist any actor who appears as a Taliban fighter in a movie? Or a soldier in the Burmese army? A serial killer? Not only are these actors not condemned, but the more they frighten us, the more they draw forth a real response from their audience and turn their audience into ersatz victims of their crimes, the more we appreciate their performance.

You can’t have it both ways. You cannot claim that video games do not deserve the same protection and respect as other forms of art, then claim that the emotional response they trigger in their audience is too powerful and needs to be banned. You can’t celebrate an actor’s performance as a murderer or an enemy combatant, then turn around and denigrate the same types of characters in video games.

If you don’t like a video game, or a movie or an exhibit of oil paintings strewn with elephant dung, don’t go to see them. If you’ve played the game, argue about its successes and failures, how it made you feel and how you reacted to that feeling. We’re far past the point where there’s a question about whether video games are a form of art.

Krix outlines exactly how he went about making the replica starting with the blueprints for the thing. He points out that his version is a mash up of the two versions that you can see on box art. The project started with cutting out parts form a ¾” sheet of MDF. After that, the cutting and carving began.

You can follow all of the steps of the project and if you are adept at DIY maybe, you can even make your own. I like the disclaimer Krix has under the photo of the finished project that states, “Note: if you email me and ask to buy this gun for $28, I will say yes; I will then take your money and mail you a box of wood shavings. You have been warned.” I wonder if $29 cold buy it.