king talk

Golan Levin, an artist and engineer, uses modern tools – robotics, new software, cognitive research – to make artworks that surprise and delight. Watch as sounds become shapes, bodies create paintings, and a curious eye looks back at the curious viewer. Golan worked as an academic at MIT and a researcher specializing in computer technology and software engineering, Golan Levin now spends most of his time working as a performance artist. Rest assured his education hasn’t gone to waste, however, as Levin blends high tech and customized software programs to create his own extraordinary audio and visual compositions. The results are inordinately experimental sonic and visual extravaganzas from the furthest left of the field.

Many of his pieces force audience participation, such as Dialtones: A Telesymphony, a concert from 2001 entirely composed of the choreographed ringtones of his audience. Regularly exhibiting pieces in galleries around the world, and also working as an Assistant Professor of Electronic Time-Based Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Levin is unapologetically pushing boundaries to define a brave new world of what is possible. His latest piece, Double-Taker (Snout), is installed at the Pittsburg Museum of Art.

After we talked about Augmented Reality some blogs ago, we saw a future scenario called SixthSense invented by Pattie Maes and her assistant at the Fluid Interface Group (MIT Media Lab). »SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.« The user has colour fingertips (colour tracking?) and small tracking cam plus a really tiny video projector (where can i buy something like that?) hanging around the neck.

I like the concept and especially the idea to project a user related tag cloud at the shirt of your dialogue partner. What if you don´t like him? Can you tag him as an idiot in realtime? ; ) Thomas Hütter (icon mobile group) told KING TALK: »Apart from the basic idea, there is one detail that aroused my attention most. SixthSense introduced a new paradigm shift: mobile phones as powerfull and promising CPUs instead of hard-to-use gimmicks.«

The idea of scanning products reminds me a little bit of the susho (sustainable shopping) concept that was created within the sustainability lectures at HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd (Germany). We thought about a gadget and an application which allows the user to get additional information regarding sustainable aspects of a product.

via TED Talk