Hasta La Ideas

Several weeks in the making, Art Hack Day took place just over a week ago and was by all accounts a sure sign that the digital counterculture is alive and well in 2012. From from January 26–28, Brooklyn’s 319 Scholes—an exhibition space in the no-man’s-zone between Williamsburg and Bushwick—hosted the 48-hour hack-a-thon, which started on Thursday night. By the time I had a chance to stop by on Saturday afternoon, it was all hands on deck as organizers Lindsay Howard, Marko Manriquez and Igal Nassima were rallying the troops in anticipation of that evening’s one-night-only exhibition of the pieces, projects and collaborations by all variety of tech-savvy creative type.

Incidentally, I ended up reporting on NYIGF just a couple days later, and it was essentially an antithetical experience. From the product-driven premise to the oppressive interior of the cavernous convention center—not to mention the alternately aggressive or disinterested attendants lurking amid labyrinthine booths, hawking their latest injection-molded doodads—suffice it to say that materialism was on display throughout the tradeshow, in stark contrast to the ingenuity and imagination that characterized Art Hack Day…

Former Core77 intern Marko Manriquez was on lasercutter duty, contributing signage (above) among other precision-cut objects for his fellow art hackers. His new-ish plaything also allowed him to explore his interest in “Ecology without Nature,” a.k.a. moss graffiti:

Made using laser cut stencils and a “moss milk shake” blend of moss, beer, water and water retention gel. Moss Graffiti serves dual functions to beautify urban spaces and as camouflage for tiny sensors (C02 & VOC) embedded for monitoring air quality and vehicle exhaust for upload to IoT sites such as Pachube. As eco-graffiti or green graffiti, moss replaces spray paint or other toxic chemicals and reactivates liminal, junk space where moss “paint” grows on its own as a hybrid form of guerrilla gardening.

David Stolarsky‘s “SwimBrowser,” for which he won the 2011 OpenNI Developers Challenge, was nothing short of brilliant. Although the GeorgiaTech Masters student (in Computer Science, of course) created the kinesthetic UI nearly a year ago, it was definitely one of the more impressive pieces on display:

Stolarsky also created a brand new work to show for the occasion (as did dozens of other art hackers, after the jump)…

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