Montreal-based fashion designer Ying Gao merges a poetry in craftsmanship with technological curiosity. After attending university at the Haute…
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This year the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York developed its first artist residency program, kicking it off with DJ…
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Calorie-free caffeine inhalers with more kick than a strong cup of Joe
In an age when medical marvels such as inhalable vaccines are becoming more widely available, it’s only logical that this convenient medium converges with the global energy drink boom. While increasingly smaller forms span shot-like bottles (R.I.P.
Nos) to
dissolving strips, Aeroshot’s inhalable caffeine has some notable advantages.
This new paradigm packs B vitamins and 100 milligrams of caffeine, equivalent to that in a large cup of strong Joe, but without craft-level preparations, the calories of Starbucks or coffee breath. Designed to be temperature resistant as well as TSA-friendly for use on commercial flights, though we haven’t tasted it yet, the website claims it’s both fast and safe.
The brainchild of Harvard professor David Edwards whose culinary innovations include inhalable chocolate and many others, this latest commercial effort has some interesting applications for looping back into the medical community. Both less messy and easier to use than today’s nasal inhalable devices, Aeroshot could have some far-reaching potential for delivering vitamins, medicine, anti-viral shots and vaccines at more affordable price points.
Hitting stores in Boston and New York in about three months from now, a free sample is available for the first 500 people who apply for a promotional code.
The U.S. Open of art: Rauschenberg’s 1966 performance pairing tennis and technology
Think branded interdisciplinary content is a recent phenomenon? In 1966 a unique project was hatched when conceptual artists and Bell Labs engineers collaborated on a series of live installations inside a National Guard Armory in New York City. One of those, “Open Score” by Robert Rauschenberg, pitted artists—including minimalist painter Frank Stella—against each other in a live game of tennis with rackets wired to switch the stage lights on and off and produce an aural musical score. Their movements were projected on large screens by infrared camera, giving the performers and the assembled crowd of 300 a ghoulish glow inside the cavernous armory
By all accounts electrifying, now 45 years later an exhibit at Seventeen gallery in London will showcase Swedish documentary maker Barbro Schultz Lundestam’s reexamination of the seminal moment in conceptual art history. She takes the audience back to those evenings in NYC with the principles involved explaining how they pulled it off and the effect they had on the actors and spectators. Check out a trailer for the 34-minute film here.
The 1997 documentary is also available for sale on DVD, but for those near London, the installation runs through 8 October 2011.
Perception shifts as art and nature intersect at the Nevada Museum of Art
Promising “unexpected access to the invisible,” what exactly the Nevada Museum of Art’s current show Landscape Futures proposes isn’t immediately clear. On first blush, the work looks like the usual collection of forward-thinking designs. But here there’s a catch.
The exhibit’s range of large-scale installations, experiments and devices all concern themselves less with the design itself than with the viewer’s reaction to it. Two years in the making, Bldgblog editor Geoff Manaugh worked with the NMA to develop an exhibition that would reflect the intersection of art and landscape architecture contextualized by the ever-evolving scope of design communication. The resulting project surveys methods for architecturally inventing and exploring the human perception of and interaction with their environments.
This flip-flopped point of view comes from Manaugh’s desire “to look at the devices, mechanisms, instruments, and pieces of equipment—the technology—through which humans can learn to see the landscape around them differently.” Revising the concept of “landscape futures” he posits that maybe we don’t need to devise new landscapes, “but simply little devices through which to see the world in new and unexpected ways.”
Artists Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada’s interactive installation “Animal Superpowers” anthropomorphizes human sensory capabilities. Furthering the theme of human impact on environment, design firm Smout Allen’s Rube-Goldberg-inspired system visualizes a technological landscape that can adapt to our water needs.
An architectural commentary on the Arctic landscape, “The Active Layer” by experimental design group The Lateral Office consists of thousands of wooden dowels arranged to point out the tenuous geography in the North. “Embracing speculative scenarios in order to provoke new ways of thinking about the future” is at the heart of the exhibition, explains Manaugh.
Furthering the cause is the recently-launched Landscape Futures Night School, a series of event-styled lectures sponsored by Studio X in conjunction with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture under Manaugh’s current direction (along with Nicola Twilley). On hand at the debut installment was lecturer Liam Young, founder of the futuristic think-tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and fellow featured exhibition artist. Creating “living maps of moss,” Young’s “Specimens of Unnatural History” ecologically replicate the Galapagos islands as populated with robotic and taxidermy entities that simultaneously reflect a “cautionary tale” of the future and a throwback to the naturalistic height of the Victorian era.
Supporting the contemplative narrative of his work, Young presented a metaphysical tour-de-force of his expeditions, ranging from Chernobyl dreamscapes to invasive species in the Galapagos conducted under the nomadic studio group, Unknown Fields Division—a group devoted to “unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies.”
Landscape Futures runs until 12 February 2012 at the Nevada Museum of Art.
“Specimens of Unnatural History” images by Liam Young. All other images by Jamie Kingman.
A behind the scenes video with Range Rover learning about the bridge between design and manufacturing
When Range Rover asked me to be a City Shaper and help tell the world about their all-new Evoque one of my first requests was to meet the car’s designers and visit the factory where they’re being built.
Exploring the role of design at Range Rover we visited their creative team in Gaydon, England to learn about how the LRX concept vehicle was translated to the all-new Evoque. From there we traveled north to the factory in Halewood to see how the cars are manufactured and what it means to bring a design to life.
LED eyelashes, wearable displays and biofeedback accessories in Dr. Sabine Seymour’s latest book
Featuring a woven fabric cover embossed with a scannable QR code, Sabine Seymour‘s new book “Functional Aesthetics: Visions In Fashionable Technology” immediately offers a simple proof that textile can be interface. In Seymour’s second book on the subject, the professor and innovator defines fashionable wearables as “designed garments, accessories or jewelry that combine aesthetics and style with functional technology.”
Seymour takes a more analog approach to the discussion on fashionable technology with eight chapters that break down the various forms of functional aesthetics and major examples of each, spanning Soomi Park‘s LED Eyelashes (filed under The “Garment as Amplifier of Fantasy”) to CuteCircuit‘s Galaxy Dress (“The Epidermis as Metaphor”). The chapter “Woven Interface” shows how innovations in textiles and the weaving process enable new practices or an extra layer of personalization, while “Scientific Couture” demonstrates how biological advances can lead to a more sustainable world.
From current fashions to exploratory prototypes, “Functional Aesthetics” covers every aspect of the subject in an easily digestible format. Additionally, Seymour offers the section “Kits & DIY” for those looking to experiment as well as “Inspirations”—a list of websites, blogs, books and creatives that best tackle the fashionable technology topic.
“Functional Aesthetics: Visions In Fashionable Technology” sells online from Amazon.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
