This may well be the coolest thing I've ever seen, early military acoustic detection technology in the form of gigantic card and paper ears.
http://little-people.blogspot.com/
A lovely project involving handpainting tiny people and leaving them around London.
Sony Announces Pink PS3! In a somewhat bizare move, Sony have announced they are producing a limited number of Playstation 3 consoles in pink colour, opposed to the standard black, white and silver.
This is a bold statement for Sony, following the announcement of the P!nk PSP in August of this year in what I guess an attempt to make gaming more appealing for a bigger demographic of people. (Full Gamespot article here: http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6156244.html?sid=6156244>
Here is a photoshop impression of what the pink PS3 will look like:
Interesting artist who uses living animals in her work, a regular collaborator with Ken Rinaldo. Much of her work attempts to model the future possibilities of genetic engineering.
Link to her webpage
The post on wikipedia about the 'grey goo' doomsday scenario in which self replicating nano machines destroy the universe and everything in it is fun. Contains some interesting observations about the nature of bacterial life.
The best bit is the quotes by the man who coined the term, Eric Drexler;
"We cannot afford certain types of accidents", Eric Drexler, Engines of creation, 1986
"I wish I had never used the term 'grey goo'", Eric Drexler, Nature 10 June 2004
In the article about 'ecophagy' meaning the consumption of an ecosystem- theres this silly but wonderful quote.
"They call it "global ecophagy". That's "eating the Earth" to you and me. Rumour has it that this is what replicating nanostructures might do, and according to one estimate, they could gobble up the entire planet in about three hours flat."
Philip Ball
Stuck?
Feeling a bit daunted by this project? Perhaps your having trouble generating an imaginative response? Or are you not sure where to start with code?
Try to keep in mind that a-life is as much a project of art as it is of science, and that you can make you response as personal, idiosyncratic and bizarre as you want.
About the brief-Try and expand on the brief if you can, subvert the task, a clever answer to the project might not need complex programming. One group are working on a project that focuses on how ideas (rumours) spread on the internet, and the idea that they might be considered a form of life.
-Take another look at the concept of life as structure, self repliacting object or organised entity.
-The work can simply show one element of 'life'- such as growth or reaction to stimulus perhaps- the work can be expressive and individual as you want.
-A vey complex idea could have a simple implementation.
Programming-Break down you project into managable chunks- and persue one chunk every four or five days.
-Work out exactly what you need each chunk of code to do.
-Is there code you have used already that you can modify or combine?
-Maybe work with something else like maxmsp, java etc... Its what you choose to make that really counts.
-Once you know what information you need- it becomes much easier to ask fellow students or staff for pointers. Many of you will have similar issues and coding tasks- and theres no reason you shouldn't co-operate and share information.
Use your imagination, play to your strengths, break the work down into managable chunks and have fun. All at once.
I know I'm not meant to help you guys with tech stuff, but so many of you have asked me about this that I thought I'd post it up.
It a tutorial on the Kirupa website that shows you how a php script can allow your flash movies to save information to a file on your server. So now you can create flash content that develops with every visit.
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx/hitcounter.htm
Just thought I'd stick this up- its not really relevant to most of you- but some of you are looking at making organisms with interfaces/bodies.
Theres a ton of interesting uses of simple sensors arrays in the PDF available on this page.
Yenova Chen, the games designer who created Flow, has also made a game called cloud- I'm just posting it here becuase the graphics are quite original and might help some of you to think about how your going to present your organisms/ enviroments etc..... Heres a link to his flickr photoset documenting it.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenovachen/sets/382166/
A nice example of drawing living creatures in flash.
http://www.jonathanyuen.com/
