domingo, 29 de diciembre de 2013

Impossible art: Mind-bending, 3-D printed masterpieces

ORIGINAL: CNN
By William Lee Adams, for CNN
December 18, 2013
3-D printers deposit material layer by layer to create a solid object, as in this dramatic headpiece by Joshua Harker. In the past each of the elements would have been crafted separately and then pieced together. 3-D printing simplifies the process and prints the work in one go.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • 3-D printing is opening new avenues for artists
  • The Van Gogh Museum is printing 3-D replicas of iconic paintings
  • Even Victoria's Secret has embraced the technology

(CNN) -- Thanks to 3-D printers, dentists can today print false teeth and medical device manufacturers can print hip replacements.

Such creations are useful, but not exactly sexy. Thankfully, artists are demonstrating another dimension of the technology, printing remarkable creations that wouldn't have been possible even a decade ago.

Take Tobias Klein. The German artist wanted to meld the architecture of St. Paul's Cathedral with representations of his own body.

Approximating the shape and dimensions of your own heart is a challenge, but Klein did not have to guess. He underwent a series of MRI scans, and then, with a few clicks of the mouse, was able to view his own heart in 3-D.
'3D' display lets you touch real world

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He then merged that with a representation of the dome of St. Paul's and sent the design to a 3-D printer, which deposited material layer by layer to create a solid object.

The result was 'Inversive Embodiment,' a twisting, mind-boggling sculpture that links man-made architecture with the architecture of a man.

"It allows me to move into more eccentric areas," Klein says. "We see a super beautiful influx of people working with the medium. We're just seeing how far this can go."

Read: Dawn of a new revolution: How 3-D printing will change the world

New possibilities
According to Wohlers Associates, a manufacturing research firm, the market for 3-D printing topped $2 billion in 2012, up nearly 30% from the year before. And while most of the cash comes from manufacturing companies, artists are throwing ever more dollars at 3-D printers and related technologies.

The desire to innovate is driving the trend, as are falling prices and the increased availability of 3-D printers.

Suzy Antoniw organized "3D: Printing the Future", an exhibition running at London's Science Museum until June 15.

"Although 3-D printing as a technology isn't that new, there has been an explosion of creativity around it in recent years," she says. "It gives artists more design freedom and enables them to create amazing things."

Bernat Cuni, one of the artists featured in the exhibition, takes children's drawings and, using computer aided software, blows the images up like balloons. A 3-D printer then produces these so-called 'crayon creatures,' turning scribbles into mini sculptures.
The Horse Marionette, made by 3D printing. Courtesy Michaella Janse van Vuuren
Michaela Janse van Vuuren, an artist and former puppet maker, focuses on designs that can only be made using 3D printing.

Her white horse marionette includes an elaborate set of wings made of countless interlocking parts, all printed in one go. That means there is no assembly required and the piece is ready for sale immediately.

"There is absolutely no way you can make this design using traditional manufacturing or handcraft methods," she says.

Fashion has benefited as well. It allows me to move into more eccentric areas," Klein says. "We see a super beautiful influx of people working with the medium. We're just seeing how far this can go."
Tobias Klein, artist

For the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in September, the lingerie giant wanted model Lindsay Ellingson to have spectacular wings that captured the intricacy of snowflakes.

Designer Bradley Rothenberg relied on a 3-D printing process called Selective Laser Sintering that can fabricate complex interlocking support without additional support materials. 3-D printing also ensured a snug fit.

"We actually scanned the model and then wrote code that generated the snowflakes around the 3D mesh of Lindsay's body."

Read: Texas company makes metal gun with 3-D printer

Financial incentive

For artists who live outside of the world's major art markets, 3-D printing helps them access customers further afield.

Janse Van Vuuren
, who is based in South Africa, says it can be costly to reach new markets and to travel to meet potential clients.

"3-D printing removes many of these barriers and has the potential to level the playing field," she says. "My designs can be printed at a location close to the buyer and many online repositories exist where buyers can choose products."

Museums see commercial promise in new printing techniques as well.

Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum, which holds the world's largest collection of paintings by the Dutch artist, has teamed up with Fujifilm to create 3-D replicas of five Van Goghs, including the iconic "Sunflowers" and "Almond Blossom."

Fujifilm scanned the works and then printed 260 replicas of each—a process that takes three months.
Vincent van Gogh's Almond Blossoms. Courtesy Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam
Known as "Relievos", the copies capture not only the colors—there are 32 shades of yellow in "Sunflowers"—but also the particulars of Van Gogh's brushstrokes, including height and direction.

They also include the frame and the backside of each painting, which have stickers and other markers of where the paintings have traveled.

"This way people can see the history of the painting," says Milou Halbesma, the head of public affairs at the museum. "A painting travels around the world. People can see it was in exhibitions at the Moma and other museums."

The Relievos sell for €25,000 each, about $34,000, and will help the museum pay for essential renovations. Previous sales in Hong Kong and Taiwan were a huge success, so the museum has launched similar sales in Belgium and the Netherlands. It will take its works to Los Angeles in the new year.

Read: Victoria's Secret model wears 3-D printed wings

Baby steps

Critics of 3-D art reproductions like to point how much they vary from the original.

But Joris Dik, a professor of materials science at Holland's Delft University of Technology, believes it is more interesting to compare 3-D reproductions to earlier 2-D reproductions. It shows how far technology has come.

Working with Canon and the Rijksmuseum, Dik and one of his graduate students developed a scanning technique that allows them to capture the ridges and cracks of a painting, and to see beyond the surface layer of paint to understand the structure of the painting.

To the untrained eye their reproduction of Rembrandt's "Jewish Bride" might be mistaken for the original.

But for Dik that's not the point. What's important is that his 3-D representation is an incremental step forward. In the future 3-D scanning techniques and printing may even replicate layers and luminescence, the quality whereby particles in paint make it appear to shine.

"The one thing that is certain is that 3-D printing is advancing rapidly," Dick says. "I'm quite sure that in a couple of years we'll be a couple of steps further."

Gorgeous Computer-Generated Flowers Bloom: Photos


British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell once said, "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty." One look at these computer-generated images from Daniel Brown and Russell's words come to life.

Brown, a London-based designer, programmer and artist who specializes in digital technology and interactive design uses custom algorithms to "grow" gorgeous floral artwork that will blow your mind. Here are 11 of our favorites.
Courtesy Daniel Brown


It all started in 1999, when Brown demonstrated a computer program and mathematical model that used special code to produce fractals. The resulting animations were almost hypnotic. "It was the first time I realized that non-technical people could aesthetically appreciate mathematical formulas if they saw them 'come alive,'" he said.
Courtesy Daniel Brown


Brown created the pieces in this slideshow for the Victoria and Albert Museum and the D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum, as well as projects for corporate clients. A swimming accident in 2003 broke Brown's spinal cord, causing paralysis. As a result, he uses a finger-splint device and a large track pad to operate a computer. Even without this added challenge, his flowers are uniquely beautiful; no two look exactly the same.
Courtesy Daniel Brown


Several years ago Brown produced a three-story-high projection of flowers for the Victoria and Albert Museum. Each petal generated contained combinations of images from the museum's textile collection. The work was named in honor of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, a pioneering bio-mathematician known for his 1917 book On Growth and Form.
Courtesy Daniel Brown


Last year, the D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum at the University of Dundee in Scotland contacted Brown after seeing his Victoria and Albert Museum work and asked him to create a piece for them. Brown said he used generative design to create the realistic flowers for this newer exhibition, which went up last spring. Each flower shape is determined by an algorithm that is then altered to take into account natural variation.
Courtesy Daniel Brown


Another mathematical formula is used to generate the color and texture applied to the shapes. Each arrangement is grown over about 50 seconds, resembling time-lapse photography that's been sped up. "After this, they fade out and another arrangement is created," he said.
Courtesy Daniel Brown


Brown's original pieces only used two-dimensional computer graphics that mimicked a 3-D look. However, in the past few years, computer technology has evolved so that he can simulate surfaces, behaviors and lighting in real time.

Sometimes Brown produces a flower that even amazes him. "I can't work out the particular parameters that would have gone into it, and am left scratching my head," he said. "Because the flowers regenerate every minute or so, it's a fleeting moment, and there is something almost poetic knowing that no one will ever see that one flower again."
Courtesy Daniel Brown


D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson was a Scottish scientist and scholar who took various natural processes such as evolution and tried to question them mathematically. He sought to discover out how differences in shape and form between two genetically related species could be mathematically modeled, Brown explained.

He also wondered about physical processes like weather, and how they could change one shape into another. Getting contacted by the D'Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum was the ultimate honor, Brown said. "I couldn't think of a more fitting thing to do for one of my scientific heroes."
Courtesy Daniel Brown


Brown's flowers are so realistic that occasionally museum visitors won't realize they're computer graphics and will insist on asking him what kind of flowers they are. Other reactions are more visceral.

"When my work was on show in the Victoria and Albert Museum, young children -- toddlers rather -- would run up to the wall it was being projected on and try and hug it," he said. "At that moment people stop seeing technology, and just see beauty."
Courtesy Daniel Brown


While he's staying quiet about plans for future art projects, Brown said he looks forward to a future when 3-D printing is refined enough to print realistic versions of his computer flowers.

Courtesy Daniel Brown


He imagines he'll be able to make ever more intricate and extraordinary flowers. "Although I was both an artist and programmer before my injury, I have switched to creating art purely with code," Brown said. "In that way I consider myself incredibly lucky. I think I had one of the only jobs in the world that could 'survive' such a life changing event as that."

To see more images, visit Daniel Brown's Flickr page.
Courtesy Daniel Brown


ORIGINAL: Discovery
by Alyssa Danigelis
Nov 21, 2013

lunes, 16 de diciembre de 2013

What is the common ground between art and science? And how is Beethoven like Darwin?

ORIGINAL: The Guardian (Nov 17), EDGE (Dic 16)


News From:
The Observer—The New Review
Read the full article →
Nima Arkani-Hamed, Martha Kearney and Ian McEwan at London's Science Museum
Photograph: Jennie Hills/Science Museum


DO THE TWO CULTURES STILL EXIST?
IAN McEWAN: That old, two-culture matter is still with us, ever since [CP] Snow promulgated it back in the 50s. It still is possible to be a flourishing, public intellectual with absolutely no reference to science but it's happening less and less. And I think it's less a change of any decision in the culture at large, just a social reality pressing in on us. And it's true that climate change forces us to at least get a smattering of some idea of what it is to predict systems that have more than two or three variables and whether this is even possible. The internet has created sites like John Brockman's wonderful edge.org, where it's possible for laymen to sit in on conversations between scientists. And when scientists have to address each other out of their specialisms they have to speak plain English, they have to abandon their jargons, and we're the beneficiaries of that.

NIMA ARKANI-HAMED: It's an asymmetry that doesn't really need to exist. Certainly many scientists are very appreciative of the arts. The essential gulf is one of language and especially in theoretical physics, the basic difficulty is that most people don't understand our language of mathematics which we use to describe everything we know about the universe. And so while I'm capable of listening to and intensely enjoying a Beethoven sonata or an Ian McEwan novel it can be more difficult for people in the arts to have some appreciation for what we do. But at a deeper level there's a commonality between certain parts of the arts and certain parts of the sciences.

IM: I'm one of those know-nothing liberal arts students who at the age of 16 remembers a maths teacher coming into the room and saying "I'll take 10 of you volunteers and I'll get you through A-level maths" so us English, history, French types went and were patiently taken through and it was the most intellectually difficult and delightful thing I ever did. And the highest I got was calculus. I thought I had reached my intellectual ceiling. Now that's first steps for any maths undergraduate but it gave me a taste for the sort of respect for a society where you couldn't really claim to be any sort of intellectual unless you had some kind of foot in the world of mathematics. So I think we're in a situation of awkward respect. You go into Westminster Abbey and Dirac's equation is carved in stone. To stand there and look at it, I think even for those of us who've got very little grasp of maths, can be a kind of aesthetic experience.

NA-H: One of the things that we try to do sometimes in explaining what's going on in physics is to find useful analogies and metaphors. But we could be doing a better job explaining the structure in which we're having these thoughts, explaining why we're doing what we're doing, explaining the pursuit of truth with a capital T which is underlying all of it: what it is that motivates people to spend three decades working with not necessarily a payoff in sight until, every now and then, we celebrate these tremendous achievements. There is an obsessive element to it which should be familiar to the artist – to many people in society. And it's driven by the pursuit of something much, much bigger than ourselves and the little trivial concerns of everyday life.

SCIENCE, ART AND THE IDEA OF BEAUTY
NA-H:
There's a very common metaphor for describing the Higg's particle. It's this idea of the universe filled with something and the little ball bearing or whatever it was passing through the fluid picking up some inertia. That's a good example of a metaphor that gives some sense of what's actually going on. There's a difficulty with metaphors, which is that you can't take them too far – they're not literally what's going on. And often when that analogy is used there's some clever person in the audience, normally a 12-year-old kid, who puts up their hand and says "Excuse me, isn't that just like the ether? Didn't you guys learn anything?" And that's when we have to say: "Trust us. It's something that fills the universe that's not like the ether" and so there's always a limitation to metaphors. It is possible to explain some of these things. This is one of the wonderful things about fundamental physics. The essential ideas are simple. The possible answers to essential open questions are more complicated but the essential issues are deep and they're simple to state. And with some patience it's possible to address them head on and get a sense for what's going on without all the details of the mathematics. But it requires a very engaged audience and it can't be done casually.

IM: Nima has written a stunning essay for the layman called The Future of Fundamental Physics. There's not a line of maths in it. I'm not going to pretend it's easy reading but you wrote it, I think, for anyone who's interested in that question, outside the field. I think we've lived through a golden age of science writing. Natural selection is not a very difficult idea but its consequences cascade beautifully. Bayes' Theorem is not very difficult, I mean it's almost arithmetic and yet the applications it now has in neuroscience are formidable. So I think we can cross these fields together and I'm very interested in the aesthetics of this. There's that famous remark of Jim Watson's, when Rosalind Franklin came to look at his and Crick's model of a DNA molecule, that it was too beautiful not to be true. Again we come into this field in which the aesthetics of something in the Keatsian sense – beautiful and true – must embrace both subjects.

NA-H: We often talk of the idea of beauty in theories. And I think if this is interpreted loosely you won't get really a sense of what we mean. We have to be a little more specific. Ideas that we find beautiful are not a capricious aesthetic judgment. It's not fashion, it's not sociology. It's not something that you might find beautiful today but won't find beautiful 10 years from now. The things that we find beautiful today we suspect would be beautiful for all eternity. And the reason is, what we mean by beauty is really a shorthand for something else. The laws that we find describe nature somehow have a sense of inevitability about them. There are very few principles and there's no possible other way they could work once you understand them deeply enough. So that's what we mean when we say ideas are beautiful. A year ago I ran into this great lecture on YouTube by Leonard Bernstein about the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth. And Bernstein used precisely this language – not approximately this language – exactly this language of inevitability, perfect accordance to its internal logical structure and how difficult and tortuous it was for Beethoven to figure out. He used precisely the same language we use in mathematics and theoretical physics to describe our sense of aesthetics and beauty.

IM: You don't hear beauty much mentioned even by composers in relation to modern music. It's not the common pursuit. For my taste all atonal music sounds like an expression of anxiety. And yet I think we do need a return to this in the arts. I don't think we have much trouble in poetry with this. Seamus Heaney died recently and there was a lot of time to reflect on his work, and the beauty of those lines, of his work was constantly referenced. Part of the problem was modernism, the great aesthetic revolution of the early 20th century to which we are all bound and must work in gratitude for – but we lost certain things. Along the way emotion and art were somewhat detached. When I was a student at Sussex University we had to write essays on a statement by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset in which he said "tears and laughter are aesthetic frauds". This was the pure, high, modernist statement, that you had to detach those feelings about emotion and beauty from art itself.

THE DAILY LIVES OF ARTISTS AND SCIENTISTS
IM: I often wonder what theoretical physicists do all day and my fantasy is they are rather like novelists. They sit around with their feet on the radiator staring out the window with a notepad within reach. They must be in the world of that kind of misty, drifting, creative thinking that has a bit of talent, a bit of luck, a bit of being shaped by current mood that can bring sudden insight. To wonder how to progress or even start a novel is to enter a state of what V S Pritchett called determined stupor, and those of us who are paid to be in that state count ourselves very lucky.

NA-H: I've always thought composers and novelists are probably very close to mathematicians and theoretical physicists psychologically in how they go about things.

Perhaps contrary to a certain sort of mythology people don't go to their offices and just churn through equations. You have a certain set of questions you are trying to solve and you have to imagine what the story could possibly be for what the solution is. You have to try to imagine what the sort of global answer could possibly look like – or at least chunks of the global answer. You try on stories – could it work like that? And often because of the underlying rigidity, the same thing that gives rise to the beauty that we talked about, it's beauty because there is a right and wrong. There is some problem that's being solved. If the story is a great story it has a better chance of being right than if it's a crappy story. And sometimes stories are too good to be true and that happens very often. And we try out what could possibly be solutions to the problems and then we have to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as we possibly can. And that's what 99% of our life is about. We try out stories and we prove them wrong. So you have this experience of failing day after day after day and it's a particularly intensely bad feeling to fail so much because you know what success looks like and you can't fool yourself when you're not there. So even though you don't know what the solution is, you know when you don't have it. You have to keep going and going until gradually you fail better and better and better and every now and then, once every two or three years, something works.

IM: Here is a major difference. I'm well aware in science how important it is to be first. Being second with the structure of DNA would consign you to the dustbin of history, whereas every novelist knows that you're in a self-sustaining world in which whatever you say is so. It's for others to accept it or reject it. I often pity those scientists who are in a race just to get on the public record for the first time – days, weeks before someone else – and your life can be transformed. Crick and Watson are a perfect case of this. If [Linus] Pauling had got there before them we wouldn't have heard of Jim Watson. It's a tougher world.

NA-H: It's one of the classic things we talk about, the difference between art and science. Even here there's more commonality than meets the eye. But I want to say one thing about originality at an even baser level of how easy it is to be original, how much innate, intrinsic talent is needed to be able to do something. And here we [scientists] have an advantage – there's this thing out there that we're not inventing but discovering. And because of that all you have to do is get somewhere in the neighbourhood of the truth. You don't have to get particularly close to it, you just have to know that it's there and then you have to not fight it and just let it drag you in toward itself. If you're very talented you might hack your way there more quickly. If you're less talented you might have to pinball around and it takes a little longer to get there.

IM: That fateful morning when one of his children was extremely ill and Darwin opened a 20-page letter from [Alfred Russel] Wallace and said "All my originality is smashed". The anxiety attack that Darwin had then, no novelist could have such a thing.

NA-H: What you're talking about – the anxiety, who gets the credit and so on – this is important to the individuals involved. It's of no importance in the grand scheme of things. But there is an important sense in which even the same discoveries, even the same existing body of knowledge, the things that are sitting there in textbooks for hundreds of years already, are perceived in different ways by different scientists. Because to be able to do anything new you have to organise the existing body of knowledge in some unique way that's your way of thinking about it. One of the deeper reasons why it's important to have different people approaching the same problem – even if they end up finding the same solution – is the path towards a solution suggests many divergent ways things could progress and having many of those paths is still useful.

IM: Writing a novel takes roughly about the time of an undergraduate course for me and you might draw on the work of a historian, you might need to read a biography of a composer. I would like to feel that we could think about science as just one more aspect of organised human curiosity rather than as a special compartment. And it has, as has been very clear from this discussion, a powerful aesthetic. I think we need to generalise it. We need to absorb it into our sense that we can love the music of Beethoven without being composers and we could love science as a celebration of human ingenuity without being scientists.

Science has had a huge effect on my own sense of the world. It certainly has helped me along the way to a general global scepticism about religion. The world of faith is inimical to the world of science and in that sense science has helped me want to write books every now and then that celebrate a full-blooded rationalism. It's one of our delightful aspects and it informs what we try to do with our laws and social policy. We don't succeed a lot of the time. And we despair of human relationships at the most private level when they're irregular or contradictory. We demand even of our lovers a degree of coherence and behind that lies a notion of consistency and rationality. Enduring Love was actually a novel wishing to oppose the romantic notion that abstraction and logic and rationality and science in particular was a cold-hearted thing, a myth I think which began with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. We need to reclaim our own sense of the full-bloodedness, the warmth of what's rational.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Related reading on Edge: "The Third Culture", 1991]

jueves, 31 de octubre de 2013

pixelstick - Light painting evolved

ORIGINAL: KickStarter
by Bitbanger Labs

Add photoreal images, abstract designs, and animation to your long exposure photos and timelapse. 


What's "light painting"?
In 1889, artist Georges Demeny created the first known light painting photograph, “Pathological Walk From in Front”, by attaching incandescent bulbs to his assistant’s clothing and taking a long exposure. The technique was groundbreaking and became the touchstone for 125 years of unique and compelling works of art. Photographers have since added colored lights and performed deft physical feats to capture interesting images, but the technology involved has remained remarkably similar to what Demeny used in that first image. Until today.

How do I start? Light painting is a fairly simple to do. 
The first step is to make sure you have the right equipment. Almost every DSLR, and most point-and-shoots, have a long exposure mode. It's as simple as choosing the length of the exposure (from a few seconds to a few hours) and moving a light source within the frame. The process itself is fun and the excitement of seeing what you captured immediately can be extremely rewarding.

If you’re like us, however, as you grow to love the medium, you’ll also grow frustrated with its limitations. Pixelstick sprang from our desire to break free of these limitations. Lightpainting involves thinking creatively and trying outlandish ideas in the pursuit of amazing pictures. Pixelstick broadens the horizon of what's possible. Over many months of shooting we found Lightpainting to be more entertaining and more rewarding than ever. We were consistently amazed by what we were able to capture; we can't wait to see what you can do with it, too.


The fine detail

Pixelstick reads images created in Photoshop (or the image editor of your choice) and displays them one line at a time, creating endless possibilities for abstract and/or photorealistic art. Taking this one step further, Pixelstick can increment through a series of images over multiple exposures, opening up light painting to the world of timelapse, and allowing for animations the likes of which have never before seen.


Pixelstick consists of 198 full color RGB LEDs inside a lightweight aluminum housing. Pixelstick’s brain, a small mounted box, reads images from an SD card and displays them, one line at a time. Each LED corresponds to a single pixel in the image. The images themselves can be from 1 to 198 pixels tall and many thousands of pixels wide. The handle is perpendicular and has a secondary aluminum sleeve, allowing pixelstick to spin freely. Pixelstick uses 8 AA batteries. Throughout testing we’ve used Sanyo Eneloop and Amazon rechargeable to great success, never requiring more than one set for a long night’s shooting.

What do we get?

A central bracket connects the two 3' sections of aluminum housing and provides a mounting point for the handle. Over many designs we found that the perpendicular handle allowed for the most natural movement for both linear striping and more organic, abstract movements. A rotating sleeve sits over the handle and can be locked tight when not in use, or loosened allowing Pixelstick to spin freely.

The handbox not only allows you to select which image to load, but controls brightness, tint, firing speed, vertical flip, and left/right direction. There is also a port compatible with remote camera triggers (Canon C1) for wireless shooting.

The entire unit is matte black, rendering it virtually invisible to long exposures. A mounting channel runs the full length of the back. This slot accepts 1/4-20" threaded bolts, standard to the camera world, and allows you to get creative by mounting things to Pixelstick and mounting Pixelstick to things.

Sturdy caps protect each end of the Pixelstick, while cable clips keep everything snug against the housing.


The full package contains:
  • LED PCBs (198 LEDs total)
  • Two 3’ aluminum extrusion with connecting bracket & diffusion lens
  • Handle with foam grip and rotating sleeve
  • Controller box with connecting cables and clips
  • Battery holder (AA Batteries not included)
  • Carry bag
The Tale of pixelstick

The Beginning
Pixelstick began as a proof of concept using an arduino and some off the shelf LED strips. We got results, but weren't happy with the resolution of nor with the durability and usability of the actual device. We moved quickly into custom LED circuit boards, a more powerful ARM microcontroller and a sturdier design made of lightweight aluminum rather than plastic tubing. With the ability to control the density of the LED count while at the same time refining the custom aluminum extrusion, the current version of pixelstick began to take shape.

Our early controller prototypes were bare circuit boards, followed by a rather quaint wooden handbox (which we still quite like), and eventually on to higher and higher fidelity 3d printed enclosures. Each iteration performed better and was tweaked as we logged more hours with the pixelstick.
PCB Evolution

Just a few of the controller iterations
Controller Handbox and PCB
The handle went from a small stud, to a long vertical bar, and then eventually to a perpendicular tube with an attachment for spinning. We are still continuing to tweak the design as we move forward and have already committed to having a second extrusion made that will be more compatible with off the shelf nuts and bolts, so that replacements and extra hardware will be much easier for to source.
Extrusion profile next to Bracket/Stud
The MiddleWhen pixelstick is funded we'll be able to start production in earnest. Our circuit board will have its final stress testing and bug checking done before we lock in one of the multiple PCB manufacturers we have lined up. Once this is set we will have an initial small run of fully assembled PCBs made to test the vendor and make sure that no issues arise on the assembly line. Concurrently, we will do a final round of 3d prints of our handbox and revised extrusion design before moving forward with the tooling for the extrusion die and injection molds. Upon receipt of our new tooling we will do trial runs of both the extrusion and injection molded components. At this point we will have all the parts to make a fully assembled pixelstick as it will ship to our backers. It is here that we will do a final check to make sure everything comes together as expected and is up to our standards. When we are satisfied we will go into full manufacture on all components and begin producing and shipping pixelstick to our backers.
What's the money for?

It's surprisingly expensive to produce just one of something. Your pledge will help cover initial costs such as tooling for injection molding, and aluminum and plastic extrusions. Additionally, the cost of manufacturing only becomes feasible when we meet the minimum order requirements for our various vendors. This means that we must have a have a certain number of Pixelsticks spoken for before we can begin the process of manufacturing them.

We have a fully functional prototype, a design that we’ve refined over months of shooting, and multiple manufacturers lined up for every phase of the project. We need only the support of interested folks like you to put Pixelstick on the map and change light painting forever.
Rewards
$10 - Pack of three 4 color, double sided postcards
$25 - 18x24 poster print
$300 ($250 for Early Birds!) - Pixelstick kit with Carry bag
Credits & Attributions

Music:
Pixelstick Montage music: Stormburner by Programs
Lightpainting Explained music: As You Want by Irregular

Artwork:

** Polaroid Pic - imustbedead Photography **
Graffiti - yeeerrrp on Reddit
Boombox - Paul Robertson (@probbz)
Scary Monsters - Cure

Various Lightpaintings:
Danimal1010 on Reddit
cal_mopho on Flickr
Crashburn on Wikimedia
Peter Thurgood on Wikimedia

The Pixelstick project will require managing several manufacturers and overseeing assembly of what these factories produce into a final product. Bitbanger Labs has experience dealing with these potential challenges from our previous project, Remee, which experienced some production delays because of components shortages and minor quality control issues. While this did cause a small delay in fulfillment, ultimately we are proud to say that we delivered a quality reward to all of our Kickstarter backers. To mitigate some of these potential risks, we have created relationships with multiple vendors prior to launch, so that we are able to react quickly should any problems arise during production of Pixelstick. While no production run is without its hiccups, we think our previous experience in not only managing a large project but also keeping our backers engaged and informed throughout the process equips us with all the tools necessary to bring Pixelstick to life.

FAQ

What size/format images should I use with Pixelstick?

Pixelstick images are 24-bit uncompressed .bmps, and should be 198 pixels high, which allows each LED to correspond to an individual pixel in the image. The images can be many thousands of pixels wide. Images that are more than 198 pixels in height are cropped by the stick when used but the file remains unaltered. For best results, we recommend resizing all larger images to the correct height, as well as experimenting with various resampling options to get the sharpest, most accurate resize.

domingo, 27 de octubre de 2013

Camila Botero: Premio al talento joven en artBo

ORIGINAL: El Tiempo
La obra de Botero tiene video, fotos impresas sobre papel de algodón y una línea de neón en la que se lee Detroit.Foto: Archivo particular
Por obra sobre Detroit, Camila Botero fue galardonada en la Feria Internacional de Arte de Bogotá.


La Feria Internacional de Arte de Bogotá, artBo, concedió este sábado el Premio Prodigy Beca Flora a Camila Botero, una de las 23 artistas que fueron seleccionadas para exponer en el pabellón Artecámara, donde se presenta el trabajo de las nuevas generaciones de creadores nacionales.

Es la primera vez que se entrega este reconocimiento, que es apoyado por EL TIEMPO y W Radio, cuya finalidad es generarle oportunidades a la escena joven local. El anuncio del ganador lo hizo la directora de la Feria ArBo María Paz Gaviria, en compañía de Roberto Pombo, director de este diario, y los curadores que actuaron como jurados: Maria Inés Rodríguez, Juan Sebastián Ramírez y José Roca.

Por su trayectoria como artista, la solidez conceptual de su obra y la calidad de la misma, Botero fue escogida como ganadora por los jurados María Inés Rodríguez, curadora del Foro Académico; Sebastián Ramírez, curador del pabellón Artecámara, y José Ignacio Roca, curador de los Proyectos Individuales. “Nos reunimos, miramos cada una de las piezas, y Sebastián Ramírez nos explicó no solo las obras, sino que nos dio un contexto de los artistas; de hecho, conocía algunos de sus talleres”, dice Roca, reputado curador nacido en Barranquilla y director artístico del espacio independiente Flora.

Botero, de 37 años, hará una residencia artística en Flora, donde contará con el acompañamiento de Roca, y participará en las jornadas Puertas Abiertas, de ese sitio. Recibirá además una bolsa de producción para desarrollar su trabajo y podrá realizar, el próximo año, una exposición individual en la sala Artecámara de la sede Chapinero de la Cámara de Comercio de Bogotá, durante la décima edición de artBO.

La obra ganadora
Arriba y abajo en el futuro es una instalación que incluye fotografías, un video y una pieza de neón, en la que se lee la palabra Detroit y que hace alusión a esta ciudad del estado de Michigan (EE. UU.), conocida por el importante desarrollo que tuvo allí la industria automotriz en los años 60, pero que ahora cayó en bancarrota.

"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
"Detroit" Foto: CamilaBotero.net
Botero desarrolló el proyecto entre 2011 y 2012 y su propósito era hacer un análisis de la transformación de la famosa urbe

Las fotos muestran sus edificios, que evidencian el abandono y el desierto en el que se ha convertido una ciudad que llegó a tener 2 millones de habitantes y que en el último censo contó escasamente a 700.000 personas. Son imágenes de los lugares donde viven y trabajan los últimos ‘guardianes’ de Detroit.

El video, que está fragmentado en historias que no duran más de un minuto cada una, registra la vida cotidiana de los que quedan. El trabajo se puede ver hasta mañana en Corferias.

¿Quién es Camila Botero?
Nació en Medellín, donde vive actualmente. Es maestra en Bellas Artes de la Universidad de Antioquia, con estudios de dirección de cine en la New York Film Academy (EE. UU.) y de análisis cinematográfico en el Centre d’Estudis Cinematogràfics de Catalunya (España).
  
Su obra abarca pintura, grabado, instalación, fotografía y video. Hace tres años realizó la residencia del programa Cedic (Casa Tres Patios y Ceroinspiración), en los límites de Ecuador y Perú, y ahora, con este premio, realizará una residencia en el espacio Flora, en Bogotá.