The new Radiohead video is shot completely without a camera using advanced live action 3D scanners in development at UCLA.

Here is the making of video.

And the finished product.

The idea apparently came from electronic artist and UCLA researcher Aaron Koblin, whose work was featured in Design and the Elastic Mind at MoMA.

This Scientific American post has more details.

We have a much more primitive device available at the lab that can scan small objects (No movement.) If you interested talk to lab coordinator, Kelly Egan. 

A new art and technology group has formed in Baltimore: Dorkbot.

Don’t be scared of the name. Originating in New York the group is a meeting of artists, engineers and scientists interested in the crossover of their fields. Currently the group is meets once a month on Tuesdays at the Creative Alliance. The next meeting will be August 19th.

The meetings are mix of formal presentations of various art, science and engineering projects. In addition there is always an open forum at every meeting for impromtu presentations, annoucements and calls for help.

The website can be found at : http://bmoredorkbot.org/

A new art and technology group has formed in Baltimore: Dorkbot.

Don’t be scared of the name. Originating in New York the group is a meeting of artists, engineers and scientists interested in the crossover of their fields. Currently the group is meets once a month on Tuesdays at the Creative Alliance. The next meeting will be August 19th.

The meetings are mix of formal presentations of peoples various art, science and engineering projects. In addition there is always an open forum at every meeting for impromtu presentations, annoucements and calls for help.

The website can be found at : http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotbmore

This is an interesting web project. It is a way to map and network sensor data from various locations world wide. Individual attach their sensor devices to the network, to let others view. Perhaps taking room temperature of a flat in London, or humidity off the California cost. This project seems to provide a lot possibilities for collaboration and reuse.

The project is called Pachube (http://www.pachube.com/).

Originally from the Make Blog.

Here's some music we created from converting remote control signals to sound.

Better than watching TV.

It seems I have been writing quite a bit lately about muscles: muscles memory, electromyography. This latest find is some research by scientists in California and Japan who have created artificial muscle. The muscle is self-healing — to an extent — and can actually generate electricity. Here is the story at discovery.com.

We borrowed some biofeedback equipment and began testing it today. Here is a look at Jimmy using the muscles in his forehead to control a tone produced by the device.

The process used to sense the muscle movement is known as electromyography or EMG.

We have now installed SketchUp Pro on all the iMacs and one tower. Go ahead and try it out.

I saw this post at Rhizome, which I thought was intriguing, not because the piece (by Guthrie Lonergan) is all that interesting or that well executed but because it reminded me of the idea of muscle memory.

Lonergan’s keyboard redrawn from memory mimicks in some way the work of Vic Muniz when he drew famous photographs from Life magazine, from memory, including this image of the famous V-Day kiss in Time Square. Vic seems a bit more adept than Lonergan.

Add to that the fact that Lonergan had two significant advantages, first, the name of the keyboard is "QWERTY," after the first six letters (he failed to get even that right) and second, muscle memory. Anyone with any typing skill can probably type minus the actual keyboard. I tried it myself and got all the letters correct.

Muscle memory has the strange quality of being automatic. I heard another story on the radio of a musician who put down the guitar for several decades only to pick it back up an remember not only the music and lyrics but cues to the drummer and the crowd.

It is thesis season here at MICA and that means people are producing work and might be looking for a web presense to advertise and promote their shows. My TA Ben, pointed out this software to me and I like it so much I might just use it myself. Indexhibit, is a simple and clean content management system for web portfolios.

Content management means it keeps track of the html, the links, the site design and you can focus on getting your work online. It is very tweakable but it is designed to focus on your work not fancy web graphics.

You can test it out on a sandbox site at indexhibits website.

To use it you need a webserver with PHP, MySQL and Apache. Not sure where to look? Well you can start right here at MICA using the graduate server. If your interested just contact the lab coordinator through the contact page, to get access to the graduate server, and the information you’ll need to get started.