Blog posts tagged as 'links'

A glut of interesting stuff on the studio list this week.

Matt Jones sent round an intro to Biophilia, Björk’s new multimedia project. As you’d expect from the small Icelandic bundle of re-invention, her new work is a departure from her previous oeuvre; Biophilia isn’t just an album, it’ll be accompanied by ten iPad apps. Her tour isn’t simply a tour. Starting with the Manchester International Festival, she’ll be continuing with a number of residencies across the world involving live performances and workshops.

Yesterday I watched the making of her new iPad-controllable celeste, the Gameleste. I love it, especially the little burst of Bach’s Invention No. 13 in A minor on organ in the middle:

The Gameleste – a custom instrument for Björk from Andy McCreeth on Vimeo.

Next door, RIG have been pumping out Robyn this morning ["I've got some news for you / Fembots have feelings too"], which seemed fitting as Matt Jones sent round Kevin Grennan‘s work The Smell of Control: Fear, Focus, Trust from this year’s graduate show of Design Interactions at RCA. It explores the blurring lines between robot and human interaction.

“The contrast between the physical anti-anthropomorphic nature of the machines and the olfactory anthropomorphism highlights the absurd nature of the trickery at play in all anthropomorphism”

Robot with sweat gland, from The Smell of Control

Mr Jones also sent round this genre mashup video. If only Amazon really sold a choose-your-own-adventure plot device button to sex up the weekend.

Plot Device from Red Giant on Vimeo.

Timo and Alex had their interest piqued by Nizo, which promises to bring Super 8 film goodness to the iPhone. I like the scrolling effect on their homepage. A nice way of tease-introducing the features which the app will contain.

Terminator 2 is twenty years old on Sunday. This stop-motion tribute is totally mesmerising:

Splitscreen: A Love Story was filmed entirely on a Nokia N8 and sent round the studio by Denise. Nicely shot, and not without a healthy dollop of romance-cheese.

Splitscreen: A Love Story from JW Griffiths on Vimeo.

Happy weekending!

Another Friday, another round-up of the various things that have been flying around the office mailing list this week.

Core 77 are running a feature on visualisations of The Metropolis in comics. Part 1 is all about the night:

Simon sent this around – a video from the camera mounted on each of space shuttle Endeavour’s rocket boosters:

Timo sent around the trailer for producer Amon Tobin’s live tour:

Matt Jones sent around Olafur Eliasson‘s latest exhibition ‘Your rainbow panorama‘ – a 360 degree viewing platform ‘suspended between the city and the sky’, which looks incredible.

Denise pointed us to this (via @antimega), a wonderful video of dust devils lifting plastic sheets from strawberry fields:

Finally, as the sun’s out here in London and music features fairly high on our agenda at 6pm on a beautiful Friday evening, Matt Webb sent around this video from Brighton based duo Rizzle Kicks – a superbly produced video, and quite a nice track as well. Enjoy!

It’s Friday. Here are links to some of what’s been blowing around the studio this week.

There’s an interview Geoffrey Hoyle about his 70′s book 2011: Living in the Future looking back at looking forward with some lovely, yet not altogether pleasing to the author, illustrations. via @futuryst

Jones pointed us to filmonpaper.com, Eddie Shannon’s extraordinary archive of film posters.

Datamoshing rears it’s glitchy head again with Yung Lake – Datamosh via @philgyford and kottke. ‘sCool because it’s nerdy…. And made better by a bit of context in the form of a how to and David O’Reilly’s first compression transitions in 2005.

Timo points to Bluefin labs, an ambitious initiative growing from the Speechome project, building on Deb Roy’s work. Couple that with this and we should be about ready for an O’Reilly Baby Hacks book.

Glorious hues are revered from the golden age of comics and despised in 10 modern movies that are better in black and white.

And if you’re trying to make the most of your space too just be glad you don’t have this much stuff on your desk.

Of course, no week would be complete without an elaborate machine, and this human powered helicopter is quite something.

Happy Weekend!

It was a busy week last week, so Friday links have rolled over to Tuesday.

Lots of historical things this week. A brilliantly curated and annotated collection of movie title cards and trailers. A work of incredible devotion by Christian Annyas via @LukeScheybeler:

An early colour autochrome photograph of equally early airshows, via Claes Källarsson:

Some early photos of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Matt Webb says: “There’s something uncanny about these unstudied portraits of people taken before they got to be such presences in the world.”:

And another historical artefact from Steve Jobs on marketing, branding and values, this is why Steve is absolute #1 mind-gangster. Via O’Reilly radar / gnat:

In one of the stranger moments last week Durrell Bishop reminded us of Maggie Thatcher killing a multi-million pound British Airways branding project with a simple gesture:

As tomorrow is a holiday, the weekly BERG links post is coming to you one day early this week!

It’s been a rather quiet week on the BERG studio list, but we (where “we” mostly = Matt Jones) did manage to dig up some interesting things from the internets.

Jason Kottke linked to Clement Valla’s collection of “melty roads” – Google Earth images where the 2D-to-3D mapping doesn’t quite work. Browsing through the images invokes an Inception-like world.

Via Khoi Vinh we discovered the brilliant “Back of a Web Page” Tumblr. Ever wonder what those Twitter birds do behind the scenes?

One afternoon we heard some odd bloopy music coming over the studio speakers, and Matt Jones confessed he’d been playing with Batuhan Bozkurt’s Otomata, a generative sound sequencer.

Go over and have a play yourself!

Via Mike Migurski came Xiaoji Chen’s Isochronic Singapore. It’s fascinating to see the city of Singapore expand and contract like a living, breathing thing as average travel times change from hour to hour and day to day.

Chen has been playing with other dynamic maps of Singapore as well:

Finally, via our neighbour and RIG super group member Alex Deschamps-Sonsino, a list of Robots, Cyborgs and Computers in Film and TV. It seems that list hasn’t been updated in at least five years (and therefore actually feels rather short), but for me the best thing about it is it reminded me of something I had completely forgotten about: the TV show Small Wonder. Ah, mid-80s American family sitcoms. Most of them are best forgotten, actually…

Vicky the robot child!

Here are a few things of note which have been posted to the BERG studio mailing list this week.

Matt Jones linked to a lovely poster from Pop Chart Lab, which organises and visualises the taxonomy of super-hero and super-villan powers. For instance, Powers of the Body/Superhuman Ability/Super Strength shows itself to be a highly populous category, but Weapons Based/Powered Prostheses/Armored Suit/Armored Suit with Telescopic Legs less so, highlighting a possible Darwin Awards subtext to it all.

Alex linked to Pica-Pic, a Flash site which lovingly recreates vintage 80′s handheld electronic games from around the world.

Matt Webb linked to a page detailing an algorithm for calculating exactly when Easter falls in the Gregorian calendar, which itself is a republishing of an anonymous correspondant in Nature, from April 1876. Hot pseudocode is hot!

And finishing on a video, Matt Jones also linked to this clever idea demonstrated on an iPad 2, marrying up a 3d engine with facial tracking from the front-facing camera. Have a great weekend, folks!

It’s my turn on the blog rota this week, and so it’s my turn to let everyone know of interesting things that have been floating around the office mailing list.

I really liked this old video explaining how differential gearing works.

Nick found this – the result of someone taking Deutsche Telecom to court to gain access to 6 months worth of mobile phone usage data.

Andy sent us this video of juggling Quadrocopters:

And we also liked this Quadrocopter combined with a Kinect sensor.

Jones sent around this series of photos from BBC4 documentary ‘Around the World in 60 minutes’. As the Space Shuttle Atlantis nears the ISS, hexagonal lens flares appears on the screen. Superb.

Finally, Matt Brown sent this video of the original animation references from Prince of Persia.

Friday. Links.

Look at this make-up to hide from facial recognition.

Matt Webb linked to this Transform game, that’s fun and reminded me of his Argos discovery of a Postman Pat that transforms into his van. There’s even a Fireman Sam that transforms into Jupiter. “Watch as Fireman Sam converts from Jupiter into a robot hero next door”.

It takes a while not to be freaked out by this barbie jewellery, but once you’re over that, it’s really nice.

XKCD shows the scales of radiation doses.

But my favourite thing from this week was shown (and explained) to me by Tom Taylor next door.

The above graph is showing the effects of the “Asimov’s Nightmare” algorithm on the markets. These are discovered algorithms by a company called Nanex who have a Market Crop Circle of the Day.

It’s Friday, so time for our usual jumble-sale of the near-future, as detected via the studio mailing list.

Nick found ChumbyCV – a computer vision framework for Chumby. Here’s one that can not only see, but has acquired motive power.

At the other end of the slightly-terrifying robot scale, are the newest designs to come out of Boston Dynamics – makers of BigDog – which include this incredible ‘cheetah’ design…

Which just gives me flashback to my youth, and the evil Decepticon cassette tape / jaguar – Ravage!

From one 1980′s toy to an update of another – what happens when you combine scalectrix (or perhaps, micromachines) with projection and computervision? Answer: you get this brilliant experiment by Lieven van Velthoven: Room Racers…

As pico projectors get cheaper and more powerful I wonder what new play forms are going to arrive in the next couple of years.

Friends of BERG, Bjorn Jeffery and Emil Overmar are likely to be involved if the first products of their new Bonnier-backed venture Toca Boca are anything to go by.

They are consciously not making games for kids but – get this – “digital toys”.

Brilliant.

I downloaded “Helicopter Taxi” and it really is a digital toy. It’s simple, delightful, charming and radiates play. It’s aimed at 3 years old and up – but the 30somethings in the studio who played with it had stupid grins on their faces from the first couple of seconds they picked it up. Really looking forward to seeing what else the Toca Boca playsmiths come up with.

More beautiful digital playthings. Tom pointed to Fez, which I won’t even try and describe – it’s just lovely. Watch.

FEZ PAX EAST GAMEPLAY VIDEO from POLYTRON on Vimeo.

And finally, Matt Brown pointed us to the new video by Airside for Flashman – the new band by Fred Deakin (Lemon Jelly) and Robin Jones (Beta Band). It’s lovely – and as Matt points out, very New British Modern…

Flashman — The Proposition from Airside on Vimeo.

Have a lovely weekend!

Hello! Here is some scoopage from the studio mailing list this week.

Timo, Einar and Jørn launched their new, beautiful lightpainting film looking at the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces:

Mr Jones found this delightful little idea for an RFID record player by Bertrand Fan:

Tom spotted these magical ‘diorama maps’ of London and Tokyo by Sohei Nishino:

Everyone enjoyed Alice Bartlett’s “machine that dispenses chocolate according to nice or mean things that people say on twitter“…

… and here is a 3D macro lens.

Also, we have been listening to some Justin Bieber slowed down 800%, playing a lot of Tiny Wings, and watching some workmen practicing capoeira outside in the street.

That is all. Happy Friday!