The best screensavers are paradoxes - they give you something beautiful to look at when you aren’t around to see it. I like Pixel Breaker’s Polar Clock – great use of colour, well worth doing nothing for. Link
David Rainbird
Posted on Tuesday, 1st of May 2007 Permalink
Have a go at the very simple but very addictive Line Rider and then look at what can be achieved. What I want to know is does he support Arsenal or Manchester United? Happy holidays!
Dave Brown
Posted on Wednesday, 20th of December 2006 Permalink
New York based photographer Brad Harris’s website, he takes a great pic and has a very original, clever and sexy nav! The site was designed by New York creative William Morrisey, I like him too!
Dave Brown
Posted on Thursday, 5th of October 2006 Permalink
Learning any type of instrument can be like learning a new language. This simple, approachable interface designed by Recent RCA MA Interaction Designer Matthew Brown has made learning relatively complex musical theory a bit more fun.
With the use of a sock and some clever electronics the ‘Singing Sock Puppet’ works by opening and closing the mouth that bends a flex sensor and makes the puppet ‘sing’ up and down a particular scale. See video
The specific terminology used to describe the different ways these guys can sing - modes and scales, diatonic, chromatic, pentatonic, blues and so on - doesn’t usually enter the school music curriculum until around GCSE level (15-16 in the UK), so the idea of learning and creating intrigue through this cute medium is a great way for a younger audience to more easily digest dry music theory at an early age.
Vikesh Bhatt
Posted on Monday, 25th of September 2006 Permalink
A non-luminescent interactive display by Jonathan den Breejen and Marenka Deenstra for their graduation project at the University of Leiden. Link (via Information Aesthetics)
David Rainbird
Posted on Friday, 28th of July 2006 Permalink
Very reminiscent of the more recent electronic Radiohead material, Thom Yorke’s solo album is definaltely a grower, but the album artwork is the winner for me. Walking through Brooklyn at the weekend I was confronted by a huge mural of the album artwork by regular Radiohead contributor Stanley Donwood. Buy the album from itunes and recieve a interactive booklet bringing Donwood’s abstract linocut views of London to life.
Dave Brown
Posted on Wednesday, 19th of July 2006 Permalink
The Shape of Song is the work of New York based digital artist, Martin Wattenberg. It is a Java applet that visualises the patterns inherent in music from Aphex Twin to Beethoven where a series of translucent arches connect two repeated identical passages of a composition. The resulting diagrams are surprisingly insightful and incredibly beautiful.
From the top: Ben Folds, Underground. MC Hammer, U Can’t Touch This. Madonna, Like A Prayer.
Gary Butcher
Posted on Tuesday, 20th of June 2006 Permalink
Anyone can paint a Jackson Pollock right? He just splashed paint on a canvas after all.
Whilst most anyone with a ounce of art appreciation knows that’s not the case you can now attempt to emulate the great abstract expressionist using jacksonpollock.org from Greek artist, Miltos Manetas.
Not as easy as it looks, huh?
Gary Butcher
Posted on Tuesday, 20th of June 2006 Permalink
Since August 2005 Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar have been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs through their site We Feel Fine.
Several playful and intuitive interfaces allow the user to browse through a database of several million emotions and organize the information in one of six formal movements. Each movement adds a layer of understanding to the relationships in the data… Do women feel happier than men? Does the rain affect how we feel? What are we feeling right now?
I’m feeling glad I found this site. I hope you feel the same.
Gary Butcher
Posted on Friday, 26th of May 2006 Permalink
One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a non-profitable organisation dedicated to the research and development of a $100 laptop, a technology that would revolutionise how children in developing worlds are educated. This initiative was launched by faculty members at the MIT Media Lab in January 2005 and moved ever closer to realisation this week by unveiling the first working prototype at the Seven Countries Task Force Meeting (view Flickr Set)
The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things will allow them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbours, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power including a Trevor Baylis wind-up radio method and will be able to do mostly everything except store huge amounts of data. The release date has not yet been announced.
Vikesh Bhatt
Posted on Friday, 26th of May 2006 Permalink