Bluejacking – Unsolicited Bluetooth Messages

There is a project underway to raise awareness of the ways in which our activities and habits can be tracked. The art project is known as Location Oriented Critical Arts, or

Loca is grass-roots, pervasive surveillance. A person walking through the city centre hears a beep on their phone and glances at the screen. Instead of an SMS alert they see a message reading: We are currently experiencing difficulties monitoring your position: please wave you network device in the air.

Loca is an exercise in everyday surveillance, tracking digital objects in physical space. What happens when it is easy for everyone to track everyone, when surveillance can be affected by consumer level technology within peer-to-peer networks without being routed through a central point?

Cool or creepy? I guess since it is under the guise of ‘art’ it may mean to be both… What next? A strap-on?

The Flipbook is Neato!

Checkout the cool program/website called Flipbookwhich is for making animations.

It’s a web application that allows people to easily create frame animation by simply drawing on screen and publish it online (yeah, it’s that simple – and works well). There are over 180,000 animation clips contributed by the visitors (including me) and the number is increasing. This work’s value would be not only in the web application itself but also in the media space that is rapidly expanding through end-user contributions — and the simple and inclusive user interface that invites people from many countries in the world to create and contribute.

London Punk Photos

Very cool punk photos on Flickr by Andy Rosen. These photos span the years 1976 to 1984 in London

This one is of Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols.

Haha, Wedding Robots!

I just saw a Google advertisement on this site for ‘Welding Robots’, which I had mistakenly read as ‘Wedding Robots‘… which turn out to exist!

Wedding photographers could be put out of a job by a robot developed by scientists at Washington University in St Louis in the US.

The machine, called Lewis, looks like an upside down dustbin with a digital camera on top.

It is programmed to wander around a room, picking out people’s faces and taking photographs.

Food-related Art

Cocinalia is a wonderful Spanish food blog and the writer, Fini, has come up with an excellent idea for a one off me-me: a virtual online food museum.

Via Slashfood.

Bran New

Here are just a few of the dozens of ‘bran’ out there…

These little bran critters are sure cute!

A bran is a template. A canvas if you like. Think back to when you were a kid – remember he-man figures? Each one essentially the same piece of plastic with a different paint job? bran is a bit like that.

Hopefully you can see bran as a creative outlet, a bit of a playground where you can try out your illustration and design skills within the confines of a simple object.

Photoshop Contest – Classical Paintings Meet Robotics

The Worth1000 photoshop contest yielded some interesting results. Now to figure out how to transform the digital form to an actual painting with real depth and richness of stroke, texture and colour, then we would have something! And yes, that does mean I think digital forms of art are lesser forms than traditional forms…

Silicon Zoo

Ridiculously tiny creatures hidden on ridiculously tiny chips…

Our search has led to a new collection of photomicrographs (photographs taken through a microscope) featuring many of the interesting silicon creatures and other doodling scribbled onto integrated circuits by engineers when they were designing computer chip masks. The tiny creatures are far too small to be seen with the naked eye, so we have provided high-magnification photomicrographs to share these mysterious wonders with our visitors.

Ascii Art

An ascii art program… cool!

Liquid Sculpture

Some amazing photos of liquid.

Liquid Sculpture is the process of creating shapes by dropping and splashing water, or other liquids. These sculptures are then photographed, since they last only a few thousandths of a second. Creating and capturing these engaging forms requires careful manipulation of the materials and precise control of the lighting and timing.