Artful clock incorporates ferrofluid

 A blend between art, nature, and technology, this clock displays time by magnetically manipulating ferrofluid, nano-engineered metal holding particles suspended in a carrier solvent. The clock, called Ferrolic, was created by master student Zelf Koelman at the department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology. He researched the technology and interaction for a year before being able to create the beautiful dynamics he was looking for. He envisions an additional app in order to customize texts, shapes and transitions. So far, only 24 of the clocks have been made but future plans to scale up production are being created.

Morphs: Moving Architecture with Decentralized Brain

Architect William Bondin calls his structures Morphs, an acronym for 'Mobile Reconfigurable Polyhedra.' These are intended to move slowly through public spaces such as parks and engage and interact with the people present there. The core innovation here is that the structure is built out of tetrahedras which consist of trusses that can extend to up to twice their length. This property allows a tetrahedra to shift its center of gravity so that at some point it can flip over in any of the three directions. This allows the structure to navigate through a space.

To do this navigation, the system relies on some simple principles that are in accordance with embodied cognition. It has sensors distributed throughout the system that measure properties such as the presence of water, temperature, and light, and based on simple rules it learns to behave so that it will avoid water, roads and shaded areas, and go towards areas more crowded with people and with more sunlight. It also learns about its environment in order to determine where it has already been and where it should go. This behavior is inspired by slime molds, which offload their memory to the environment by depositing slime so that they know where they have already been.

The environment is a crucial factor in designing embodied agents, as Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard describe in the book "How the Body Shapes the Way we Think". And it is often overlooked by designers of intelligent agents, who may tend to think from a cognitivist perspective and focus on the brain as the main controller of behavior. We need to think of behavior as a dynamically evolving interplay between the agent's brain/neural system, body and the environment. Together, these factors make the system reach certain 'attractor states' of behavior that fit the embodiment in an optimal way so that it will behave most efficiently. The book mentions some interesting ideas about how to have the environment contribute to the emergence of intelligent behavior:

- 'Scaffolding': Structuring the environment with passive objects to simplify tasks. With adequate scaffolding, mechanisms for successful navigation will be very cheap.

- Offloading memory to the environment - information about the past can be contained in the current situation this way and included directly into sensory-motor loops rather than requiring cognitive action.

- Getting the material properties (elasticity, stiffness, damping etc.) of the body exactly right to fit the environment is crucial. If we get the material properties right, the desired behaviors ('trajectories towards attractor states') will emerge from the interaction with the environment. I can't stress enough that every detail is crucial here - imagine for example if your achilles was only a little bit less elastic or a little longer; it would completely change the way your entire body moves!

- Placement of sensors is also crucial - it is best to have sensors there where the most structured data can be derived from the environment.

Based on these kinds of principles for embodied intelligence, as the Morphs are a nice example of, I would like to see much more innovation!

Reuben Margolin's wavy kinetic art

Reuben Margolin creates moving sculptures with an intriguing complexity and serenity to them. He uses sine waves, movements inspired by water, and even live dancers connected to strings as input for the movements of his sculptures.

The wave is an interesting phenomenon, it seems to always capture our attention effortlessly when we see one. The movement seems so perfect and tranquil that it is can seem almost like a token from another dimension. Similarly, with these sculptures you become so engrossed in the movement that you forget that they are made out of ordinary objects such as soda cans and bike reflectors. The physical world then transfigures in a world of experience, a world of energy, a world beyond being an object among objects. Here we have a visual reminder of what intellectually quantum physics has already shown: waves and particles are nothing but different interpretations of the same underlying field.

Living flower pot

The 'Feedme' flower pot by Svetlana Mikhailova seems to be a living organism itself, in a symbiotic relationship with the plant it contains. It is made of a hydrogel, which allows it to change shape by absorbing water. The pot will be smooth when the soil is dry, and get spikier the more water you add to it. The pot can also retain water for a longer time than a conventional flower pot, so the material has not only an aesthetic and informative function, but also a direct physical function in that you don't have to water it very often.

Theo Jansen's lifework

In an age where things seem complex and changing all the time, there is still an underlying creative evolution that keeps the entire process somewhat stable and in harmony. People who remain aligned with this evolution are rare, but Theo Jansen is definitely one of them.

Out of all things, he has decided to focus most of his life to his Strandbeesten, which we all know. In his words, the idea of Strandbeesten has taken possession of him and has since been spreading like a virus. Theo has been speaking at TED Delft a couple of days ago, and shown the world the evolution of his work over more than 20 years. He truly is one of the pioneers of creating objects with embodied behavior, objects that are not driven by abstract electronic brains, but where the intelligence is in the structure of the body itself. And recently he has been taking this further in giving the beasts more 'intelligence'. Watch and listen to his story here:

Fabbing strandbeesten

Ah, finally we hear again from Theo Jansen. The man has turned to 3D printing as a way to manufacture his famous 'Strandbeesten'. For about a hundred American dollars you can now buy your own miniature Strandbeest from Shapeways.

And they work magnificently:



In the following video you can hear some comments from the man himself.



Theo Jansen really seems to be an incarnation of the old lone master, who develops stunning works that will root themselves in the collective unconscious of mankind. And maybe sustaining his level of genius requires his mind to be more isolated from the more mundane processes of society. On the other hand, I tend to think that more challenge and enrichment can be found through combining work both on an internal level through deep study, creative exploration and masterful synthesis, and on an external level through trying to manifest this creativity into the world in various ways. Theo Jansen seems to be only active on one far end of this spectrum, and keeps his creations very pure. He does want to spread them, as he mentions the objects seducing us to make them. But I think we can spread them faster by creatively searching for ways to make Strandbeesten, or maybe just the mechanic principles behind them, marketable. To give an analogy, the yogi can sit in the mountains -or on the beaches- all his life, having transcended his personhood and having found higher states of consciousness more worthy of residing in, but he can only become truly enlightened if he learns to take what he found into the world and spread it there. Maybe this means that initially only small bits will take root here and there, but at least it's pushing things in a better direction. I would like to give Strandbeesten jobs, for example in becoming billboards, because those would at least be nicer billboards than the ones of today.

Balloon racetrack made from air multipliers

For everybody who remembers the movie "Der Lauf der Dinge", and has an affinity for floating stuff, here is what you can do with a bunch of Dyson air multipliers and a balloon.

furniture pets

There you go, furniture that becomes your pet through displaying simplistic behaviors like neediness, anger, and sexual excitement. I love these crude experiments in product movement. No matter how silly these explorations are, they can still bring knowledge and ideas to the companies that are actually going to implement product behavior on a massive scale.

Living Dress

Lady Gaga has recently set foot on the stage wearing a mechanized dress with several moving parts, reminding us once again that the image of the cyborgized human is gaining foothold in popular culture. The mechanics of the dress seem not too complicated when compared to, say, Hussein Chalayan's creations, nor does it seem to be very stable as the singer had to stand still during the performance. Nevertheless the choreography makes this performance have a great impact in simply burning an image of a human on our retina that we would more relate to a virtual character in your average MMORPG.

sculpting through singing

How simple an idea, yet how brilliant the enaction. Mitchell F. Chan had the idea of physicalizing voice through ondulating ropes, and used the increasingly popular programming environment Processing to analyze the voice of soprano Ashleigh Semkiw and turn this into output for motors to change the frequency and intensity of vibration in the ropes. Thus he gave nascence to a kinetic sculpture in which human and technology are intrinsically connected as if they were one.

display skin

Tokujin Yoshioka concepted this installation for Swarovski at their stand at Baselworld 2009, probably being very inspired by Daniel Rozin's work. I'd like to see this taken further and implemented as a self-actuating skin in consumer products, so skin can become display.

future fossils

Here's some astonishing work by Korean artist Choe U Ram, who makes these robots with an extraordinary organic quality and subtlety of movement to them. It's almost better than nature.

the merging of technology and nature signified in kinetic art

here's a small snack of kinetic art.




If there's anything I'd recommend you to do with scrap material; it's not trying to recycle it as much as possible, but create something new with it, like Casey Curran does with his kinetic wire art sculpture series "Oceania":


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