Posts tagged ‘inspiration’
Sep
02
2010
The Wilderness Downtown
One of my favourite bands, Arcade Fire, has collaborated with Google and writer/director Chris Milk to create an experimental video for their song “We Used to Wait”. Made to play in Google Chrome, The Wilderness Downtown starts off asking for the address of your childhood home and then becomes in an incredible audio and visual experience that uses choreographed browser windows of varying sizes popping open or closing and displays animations of digital flying birds flying from one window to the next and a pair of feet running along a street. All of that builds up to a climax when images of your street and childhood home are blended into the video, creating moments of surprise, delight and nostalgia. Self-reflection and sentimental thoughts are triggered near the end with pause allows you to write a message to your younger self, after which animated trees sprout all along your old street.
Using HTML5 technology, the collaborators have created a technologically impressive and creatively piece of work to create an awe-inspiring audio/visual experience.
May
13
2010
Nov
21
2009
Fall Colours
I’m starting to get back into some fashion photography, which I had started about 4 years ago. This shoot was inspired by the vibrant colours of birds and set in a forest by my house. My sister did a great job of the fashion styling.
Clockwise from top-left: Golden-Breasted Waxbill; Indian Blue Peacock; Buff-Bellied Hummingbird; Red-Throated Sunbird.
More pictures on Flickr.
Oct
06
2009
Nuit Blanche ‘09
Torontonians came out in droves last Saturday for the 4th annual “free all-night contemporary art thing” that ran from sunset to sunrise. It’s spectacular to see such an event bring out so much people and liveliness out to the streets during the wee hours of the night to experience city-wide art exhibits. Projects ranged from the playful and participatory to the haunting and mysterious.
Of course, this type of creative happening also brings out spontaneous activities unplanned by the city: buskers with fire and chainsaws, collectives encouraging group gatherings in the middle of the street, and my favourite, an awesome 8-bit musician by the name of deadbeatblast performing electronic music using the sounds from playing GameBoy and Nintendo games.
Unfortunately in the 6 hour span I was out, I didn’t get the chance to see all the exhibits on my must-see list and completely had to skip out on an entire zone. It’s become a victim of its own success — meaning huge lineups and massive crowding. Some projects had up to 75 minute waiting times, such as the fantastic Space Becomes the Instrument (but quite worth it in the end.) In total I probably waited around 2.5 hours in lineups, which was a horribly inefficient way to spend my time.
Below maps the highlights of my evening from 10pm to 4am.
Jun
27
2009
Microsoft’s Tangible Vision
I found a video from Microsoft Research envisioning applications for touch interfaces. What I found really neat was the similarity of the bowl idea to my marble player, in which media storage devices are thrown in and images are projected onto the sides (@1:30 in the video).
Jun
24
2009
Inspiration: Bubblegum Sequencer
Bubblegum Sequencer is another inspirational tangible device allowing one to create drumloops by physically organizing gumballs a grid of holes.
Jun
21
2009
Inspiration: Math Marbles
In researching various forms of play, uses and applications involving marbles, I came across a nifty marble calculator. Not only does it really add binary numbers, the playful visualization and sounds make it a wonderful little contraption. Brilliant!
Jun
12
2009
Projects Relating to Tangibility & Memory
I found two really interesting projects relating to my design concept: one dealing with small, tangible components that interact with each other, and the other dealing with memory capture and recall.
Siftables are tangible blocks containing digital information/media that can interact with each other wirelessly by way of gestural motions, physical contact and proximity detection.
reQall is a memory aid system/service allowing one to capture, recall, remind and share information using a wide variety of platforms (text message, instant messaging, email or voice) and applications. In instances when you cannot write something down or are on the road, you can simple call reQall to say the information and the system will be able to interpret the natural language and organize your information according to the context of the reminder.
Really cool stuff!
