Short video art.
Visuals: Omer Golan
Sound collage: Itamar Kav Tal
Useful Toys & Useless Tools – Victor Vina
Yesterday I attended a lecture in H.I.T (Holon Institute of Technology) titled Useful Toys & Useless Tools by Victor Vina, an interaction designer and educator from Barcelona Spain, who’s working in the intersection of design research, digital craft and open technologies. Vina was invited by H.I.T to give a workshop and talk with product design students at the institute.
The lecture was fascinating. Vina displayed some nice examples of works and hacks, and the overall message was for students to open their minds and experiment with technology. He encourages the student to play around with electronics until “something nice happens” and then think of some concept for it.
I was surprised by Vina’s statement about not considering the works he displayed in the lecture to be art, and especially the ones he called Political Artefacts with the clear political and social orientation. To me, the lack of function of what he called Useless Tools was all the more a characteristic of their artistic expressions.
Vina’s workshop was all about the Arduino micro controller which has its own open-source Arduino environment makes it easy to write code and upload it to the i/o board. I signed up for an Arduino workshop over at Garage Geeks in Holon (Garage Geeks is a physical & virtual space for multi-disciplinary creative people to meet, innovate and build non-commercial projects that would otherwise may not come to life).
I’ll write about the workshop and Arduino next week. Cheers, Omer.
Eyewriter
What is ‘eyewriter’ ? The EyeWriter project is an ongoing collaborative research effort to empower people who are suffering from ALS with creative technologies.
It is a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes.
I got interested with assistive technologies a while ago because my good friend Daniil’s work on speech disorders. I think that there’s still a lot more to be discovered on the intersection between ART and Science and Technology. Use our creative minds to deal with a variety of issues and disabilities. I really believe that there is a creative solution for almost everything. All we need to do is collaborate more. Share more. Artists can and should use open-source and DIY resources in their work as much as possible, spread the collaborative spirit and find solutions faster. This project is the perfect example for such productive collaborative research effort of artists, engineers, and more people who cares enough to do. It is amazing what they did for this fellow. Even though that this eye-tracking technology exist for a couple of years and was utilized in a number of art installations, this is by far the best & most important implementation of this combination of technology and art. You will probably have a laugh but watching this clip made me want to go out to a near by hospital and look for problems that I could solve with creative thinking.
Decrypted Reflections – Chris Sugrue
Cool installation by Chris Sugrue. Although the visual end result of this video installation is a little disappointing to my view, but the experience itself seems fun and have its own aesthetics, mainly because of those cool sunflowers-like round mirrors which served as an analog interface for the artwork. Visit his website and check out more of his work. I would sure love to collaborate with this guy on an installation sometime.
An interactive installation that explores light, space, and generative systems. The interface for the work is an analog system of mirrors that invites a visitor to manipulate the projected image, moving its broken pieces to create new structures, or explore the original form.
Itamar plays the flute
Another max/msp/jitter experiment. Itamar Tal on the flute.
The flute control density and size of text.
From: Faza – real-time video installation.
max/msp/jitter
2010
Omer Golan
