The minds (and bodies) of Syyn Labs spent the past three months building a huge, two-story Rube Goldberg machine during which a piano gets dropped and a TV is smashed with a sledge hammer. Why? It’s the centerpiece for the latest music video from the band OK Go (remember… the guys who did the treadmill video). It features the song “This Too Shall Pass” and even after listening to it hundreds of times, it still sounds good!
Huge thanks to the band for this opportunity and to all the Syyn Labs and Mindshare folks that helped pull this together. Special recognition to Adam Sadowsky for orchestrating the whole thing like a pro conductor. Thanks to all the people that helped make my vision for the Legos a reality! Namely: Dylan Bushnell, Heather Knight, Liya Brook, Paul Grasshoff, Peter Svidler, Izumi Hamagaki, Wyatt Bushnell, Sam Leventer, and Mahdroo McCaleb. Hats off to the steady camera man, a major hero for his ability to capture this on film! Thanks to the magical eye of Josh Reiss for capturing photos of the whole thing too!
LACMA is featuring a few components from the machine, including the Legos! There will be a concert fundraiser on March 5th, 2010. For tickets call 323 857-6010 or visit the LACMA site
More info on the project and the release is available here
Wow! What a weekend. The Virsix showroom was alive and packed during the biannual Brewery ArtWalk. We had five of our games available and people ages 5 to 70 competing away! Players tested their cat burgling skills in the Laser Maze, avoided traffic in our foot tracking Frogger-style game, contorted their body for human Tetris, and even flew around the galaxy in a space battle. Thanks to all involved for their help putting this on, especially the guys at H2P for a marvelous job filming.
Gradman and I setup a series of interactive installations for the weekend Artwalk event at the brewery 4/18-4/19/09. We exhibited Shadowsmoke, Artfall, the Party Table, the uWink 3D “Marshmallow” game, and the Cloud Mirror. We were busy all day and really enjoyed showcasing all these toys to the excited art goers. Look for us at the next one!
For the past few months I’ve been taking photos of graffiti in and around Los Angeles. There’s *a ton* of it in this city and a good portion is really excellent art and unique typography. I don’t yet have a camera with a GPS chip so I’ve been marking waypoints on my Garmin as I’ve taken the shots. A given graffiti location changes over time, so my plan is a Google map mashup of these photos with their location and an interface that allows navigating the spot over time. The alpha is available here.
I had a blast collaborating with Eric Gradman last month on an interactive art installation named ArtFall. There’s a complete description here, and a downloadable iPhone encoded video here. Update: Artfall was covered in Makezine, Hackaday, Matt Cutts blog and a French blog.
I love python for a lot of reasons, not the least of which are easter egg gems like this:
[brent@ronin ~]501$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jan 17 2008, 19:35:17)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> import this
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!
>>>
