Looking Outwards

Aposematic Jacket from Shinseungback Kimyonghun on Vimeo.

Aposematic Jacket is a recent piece by artist duo Shinseungback Kimyonghun. The piece is a modified suit embedded with cameras that, when a user presses a button, records the surroundings of the user in 3d. The title of the work is a reference to Aposematism, the coloration of some poisonous animals that gives off the warning signal of “I can poison you”, while the Aposematic Jacket gives off the warning signal of “I can record you”. I thought it was incredible how the the piece shows that today, a camera lens can feel as threatening as a primitive biological reaction.

update: apparently this is actually made using a Raspberry Pi, the article I read was wrong

A Toast to Observation from Ben Haworth on Vimeo.

A Toast to Observation is a project created by UCL students. I found this project interesting because it takes the ordinary gesture of tapping a spoon against a glass to to call for a toast during a meal and transforms it into a surreal robot-controlled performance. The very human gesture becomes almost uncanny when repeated in a non-human way.

Kinect, Computational Media, Physical Computing from luisa covaria on Vimeo.

I’ve recently been more interested in projects that transform sound after being introduced to Max, so although this project is still in sort of a demo stage, it caught my attention because the idea of “remixing” the sound of breaking glass in real time can definitely be expanded upon, and I could see all sorts of weird generative musical instruments that could be invented from it.