Sweet, my show is this week and all are welcome to the opening!
Press Release:
“Jackoon” 2008 and “Jackoon v2.O” 2009, Wood, acrylic and electronic components, 8″ × 12″ × 5″
Rush Arts Gallery
526 W 26th St # 311
New York, NY 10001-5521
(212) 691-9552
January 5 - January 27, 2012 Opening Reception: January 5, 6- 8pm
Electronic artist Oscar G. Torres creates art machines or “artbots” made from hacked toys, open-source code and simple fabrication materials. As the artbots travel autonomously, they lay color on the canvas with the brushes attached to their robotic arms. Simple materials such as wood and tape are used to build these machines, which contrasts the high-tech computing systems that make them function.
The term “Postanalog” is used by Torres to encapsulate society’s current pseudo-symbiotic relationship with digital technology that is used in everything from the alarm clocks that wake us up in the morning, to the life support systems in hospitals that literary keep people alive. Digital technology has even infiltrated the deepest and most personal places of a person’s life as embodied by the mobile phone. Machines have allowed us to see new things by extending our limited, five-sense, perception of the world. They allow us to travel far beyond the limits of space and to understand that even “thin air” is a sea of complex matter. Society is dependant on digital technology. Machines are the cradle to our civilization and their absence would result in collapse. “Postanalog” is a term that suggests the embrace of technology as a tool to help humanity thrive, and now, a tool for art.
Time is funny, sometimes it passes by very fast. Other times it passes by really slow. Either way, the only time you have to do anything is the present, so that is the time you have to make the best in life.
What else can I talk about other than playbadger.com and electronics? Maybe I can talk about #occupywallstreet or other political events that are important in this day and age. I think I’ll just talk about Badger.
Badger has definitely been a good project to develop. I have learned a great deal about people, business and technology. The most beneficial part of it all is the actual finding of things that interest me. Which is kind of nice since working so much for so long has fogged these things.
How many times have you been asked through out your life what are the things you like to do? This was especially true, in my experience, during Middle School and High School. Teachers, parents, parents friends and anyone who knew about you would ask about your interests in hopes of giving suggestions for possible career paths. This was the time when the sky was the limit and the only thing holding you back was interest.
What am I interested in?
What do I value?
Playbadger.com has shed some light into that question. Through badger I have re-discovered a lot of interests that I enjoy. Aside from art related topics such as Street Art and Gallery Openings or Typography, I have re-enforced my admiration and intrigue with Bugs! Specially Bees. Another thing that I realized through badger is that the reason I take so many pictures is to compensate for my really awful short-term memory. Now when I go to an event or party and for some reason leave my bike over night, I “badge” it with my personal tag. “Badging” a picture of the bike takes less than a minute. I take a picture of the bike in its environment and plot the location. The next day when I wake up and freak out because I forgot where I parked my bike, I look at my phone and boom there it is. I found that this works well with parking my car in the city.
I noticed that Badger also answer the questions “Where did you see that?” and it also helps you keep track of the location of the things you shared.
An other cool development is using pictures from Badger for interactive installations. At my birthday party the other day, I projected the latest pictures that where uploaded to Badger. The software would grab the latest image and use a microphone to make pixels grow according to the intensity of the music. The result was people taking pictures of themselves to be projected with pixels that got bigger to the music.
Here is an example of what people saw:
Image from Badger:
Image processed with low sound:
Image processed with high sound:
It was a pretty cool experience. And best of all this little experiment is opening the door for more interactive installations in the future!
Long story short, I am looking forward to have people upload bugs to my bugs badge since I enjoy looking at them so much! Also Halloween, it would be cool to see Halloween pictures from all over the country.
Its been a while since I wrote a blog post. The delay has been due to my immersion in the world of Badger. What is Badger? Its my awesome project and I will talk about it after I share my IOIO findings.
I noticed that sparkfun stopped selling the ioio module for some reason. After researching possible causes, I realized they had just updated the module.
While looking into the possible causes for the [non-exitent] demise of the ioio, I found a bunch amazing projects! The cool thing about the ioio is the ability to control hardware with software, in this case with your android phone! First you have the good old “hello world” which is usually a little blinking LED like this:
While looking for hello “hello world” videos of ioio’s I found this new little micro-controller by GHI Electronics called the FEZ Domino, a .NET Micro Framework module to interface with the Android. It looks like a nifty little MC and its open source, as far as i can tell.
Weather its the FEZ or the ioio, after your Eureka moment, there will be a flood of possibilities crossing your mind. Soon you will be making little interesting projects with your Android’s accelerometer and the voice recognition apps:
And sooner than later, you make the leap to making a robotic contraption with an algorithm that can actually solve the most difficult of puzzles like the V-cube 7:
This brings me back to why I’m writing this blog post.
1. I love opensource hardware
2. I love mobile
3. I began a project called Badger that has sucked my time and would like to tell you about it!
Badger is a website (and soon an iPhone App) that allows you to make badges of anything that interests you. These badges become Visual Hash Tags that are used to group picture and videos that people upload into blogs and maps.
This is a map of the stuff that I uploaded to Badger from my Desktop, Android (via picture text message) and iPhone App (The Beta).
Badger gives you a place to upload pictures of interesting things that you encounter. Even if they may seem like silly mundane thing that nobody cares about.
In Badger people like Jacek (Co-Founder) made a “Street Art” badge to upload all the street art that he sees. Since badges are collective, anyone can submit content to the badge. Natan (Co-Founder) and I started uploading pictures to the street art badge which is becoming an interesting game/conversation around this topic. I cannot see street art now with out having the need to “Badge” it and I did not even know I liked street art this much!
In Badger everyone cares! All the pictures are public, which means that everyone interested in similar topics is looking. You can share the silly pictures you take (which Badger takes very serious), like that nice lamp you saw at the restaurant that was serving the fancy drinks! Or maybe it was a bug that you stumbled across while taking a break from riding you bike around town.
Badger is about all those moments when you are behind the camera, not in front of it. We are hoping that Badger becomes the central venue to go find a map or a blog of pictures about anything! And a place to perhaps connect with a group of people that are interested in the things that you might find weirdly appealing… or not.
Fell free to sign up to the Beta Site and poke around at the content. Every picture has a badge associated to it and you can see more pictures that are similar by clicking on the badge associated to the picture. You can make your own badges once you sign up. Try it out and send us some feedback if you like, at info [at] playbadger.com
I’ve notice that we are making some interesting leaps in technology. Geeks and Nerds are innovating at a faster rate than I initially thought. Open source projects are making great leaps specially in the mobile world.
Here are some projects that have great potential. They are just beginning to scratch the surface and is a sign of the greater things to come.
The first trend that’s happening is the use of androids to interface with PCs. Here is a little hacked software that allows the android phone to act as a mouse controller for a computer.
Sooner than later you will have software on your phone to control just about anything with an internet connection and digital controls.
An other little device that will certainly enable hackers and techies to do some rapid prototyping is the IOIO (pronounced yoyo.)
The IOIO is an open-source micro controller that connects to your android phone. The little micro controller is packed with 16 analog inputs, 9 PWM outputs and an astonishing 48 i/o digital pins. This will allow you to make gadgets control via mobile device:
If you think that these innovations are already too cool for their own good. You have not kept up with ubuntu news. Just a few weeks ago the news spread like wildfire about the Raspberry Pi:
I mean just look at what’s packed into this little computer that is no bigger than a pack of chewing gum or a USB stick!
- 700MHz ARM11
- 256MB of SDRAM
- OpenGL ES 2.0
- 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
- Composite and HDMI video output
- USB 2.0
- SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
- General-purpose I/O
- Open software (Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, Python)
With all this, what else do you need to make your very own terminator…
Here is a good resource video with lots of helpful links in the video description:
I guess you would need the generative titanium and the living tissue colonies etc. but that’s besides the point. The tools are there to make just about anything and it fit in the palm of your hand. Plus when you add the additional open source software, you have an arsenal of tools that is unmatched aka hackarsenal…
Sooner than later, you will be able to build your own mini helper:
Or just buy one for your self and then customize it:
I predict that by next year this time, we will have fully functional personal computers the size of your cellphone that you can carry around everywhere like a laptop, but pocket sized.
It reminded me of the automated system in the commercial fashion world. Mass production of clothing is now a job for robots so why not give them a shot at making fashion too… Actually this performance is more that just a fashion statement, its a reflection of society and the integration of technology in our life.
Trends in fashion mirror trends in society. The current state of humanity is the adoption of technology to enhance our lives. Mobile technology, algorithms and micro-computing are allowing us to patch our personal flaws. Having bad memory is easily solved with a smart phone which can remember things for you or help you google something on the spot, so remembering something becomes a little trivial…
Embedded technology will be the next generation of mobile tech. Just imagine a pice of clothing, kind of like Elizabeth Fuller’s “Life Dress” but who’s capabilities go beyond just emission of light. What if it was a reception-emission model. In other words, what if each little light in the dress also had sensors that would study your environment for you and then the dress tells you what it found out.
Maybe its co2 sensors that tell you that you may be in trouble like Kristin O’Freil’s CORSET which reacts to high levels of CO2
Maybe its like Nike+ that has a little accelerometer in one of the silicone squares. Maybe every little square is a different sensor!
The bottom line is that the embedding of technology in our garments has great potential to extend our abilities to comprehend our world. It will also let us know great correlations from the data gathered from our behavior.
Sooner than later we will see Smart Clothes which will be replacing our dumb clothing. I can’t wait for my self drying vest to go with my hover board!! =)
Great thanks to Mr. McQueen for laying the foundation for this great movement in the fashion world.
There is a growing trend in mapped data and user generated geo-location content. Red Bull commissioned a web site that shows street art in the street view of google maps. This is a pretty nifty concept, the only problem is that street art has a fast turn around and if you want to see the art in real life, you may not find the art because the image is outdated.
Badger will have a hard time competing for attention with all these applications being made by companies with big budgets. At least we know we are on to something interesting that others are thinking about.
Click on the image to check out badger’s current street art submissions:
Its been a crazy year with lots of things happening. The launch of a new version of Badger at SxSW, work at Grey and managing a few other projects does not leave much time for sleep.
For some reason I keep putting my blogging at the end of the list when it should be closer to the top.
Expect to see more random posts that make no sense a lot of the time.
To help promote their beta launch at SxSW, badger is giving away an iPad 2 to the most popular image for the #sxsw Rock On Austin contest. So if you have a really good image from SxSW in Austin Texas, go ahead and make an account so you can post your image to the Rock On Austin Badge!
Badger is a new social network where you can share your pictures by geo location with friends and the world. The unique twist about Badger’s way of organizing images is that all image and video content is associated to badges that also serve as categories to organize the images. Anyone can custume make a badge on Badger and once a badge is made friends and fans can take that badge and make it their own to use. Badger is a great platform for mapping things as a group and the community as a whole gets maps of just about anything.
