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Popular Science ca. 1952

Robot Creates the World's Nerdiest Light Paintings

Robot Creates the World's Nerdiest Light Paintings: German artist Nils Völker has managed to do what no high-school geometry teacher can: Make pi kinda’ fascinating. His trick: a quirky little robot, which turns that old Euclidean headache into gorgeous, gallery-ready light paintings.

[vimeo 17984729]

Völker calls the paintings (which are technically photographs) Variations on Pi, and to make 'em, he cobbled together an Arduino-controlled, LED-equipped robot -- a sort of cross between a vacuum cleaner, a Dan Flavin sculpture, and R2-D2. The robot is programmed to visualize pi by flashing its lights and scooting around on the floor like it's doing some kind of android Hustle, while a camera mounted overhead takes long-exposure photos. Check the video above.



Now here’s where things gets a bit complex (and totally nerdy): Of the 50 photographs Völker created, each visualizes a different range of pi’s decimal digits. Völker explains:

“There's a program running on the microcontroller which reads the decimal digits of pi. The first digit defines where the robot should go. The next one defines an angle from which each rotation starts. The following three define the red/green/blue values of the LEDs -- basically the color of the light when the rotation starts.”

Based on those instructions, the robot goes round and round for about 4 minutes 'til it completes a single 'painting.' Rinse, repeat.



Which all sounds terribly complicated and, frankly, a little OCD. So what’s the point? Look at the photographs. They’re stunning, for chrissake -- equal parts Robert Smithson and Dr. Who.



To see the complete set or to buy a print (for 200 Euros) go here. And for more Co. coverage of Völker’s fantastically hypnotic work, click here.




[Images courtesy of Nils Völker]

olafur eliasson: your blind passenger

Is this your utopia?

olafur eliasson: your blind passenger:
the installation is a 90-meter-long densely fogged tunnel in which museumgoers are forced to use senses other than sight to navigate and orient themselves within the space.
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Molly Hunker/Gregory Corso: Life Will Kill You

Like a low-rent seed pavilion...

will kill you is a temporary installation for the Revolve Clothing showroom in west hollywood. To stand in contrast to the high-fashion clothing of the boutique, an everyday industrial material, the zip tie, is aggregated to create a floating volume that nestles below an existing soffit. The design is intended to explore the edge between aggression and elegance through material sensibility, overall form, and visual effect.

The cloud-like volume is created by a double-sided surface composed of over 100,000 zip ties. The exterior surface of the volume is an aggregation of longer, wider white zip ties while the interior is comprised of shorter and finer colored zip ties. the resulting bulging form offers ever-changing glimpses of blurred yet vivid color combinations as the zip ties layer on top of one another in the predominantly black and white store interior

Life will kill you is a temporary installation for the Revolve Clothing showroom in west hollywood by LA based architects Molly Hunker and Gregory Corso. Tolly Hunker and Everyone Should Follow Everything I Follow*

Video: Jim Campbell’s Scattered Light

Video: Jim Campbell’s Scattered Light: 

Jim Campbell's Scattered Light from Craig Dorety on Vimeo.

The ‘pixel’ has been an omnipresent trope in architecture for years. Despite its well-worn presence as a post-rationalizer in design, there is still much to be said and made of the process.


As we’ve mentioned a few times before, Jim Campbell’s light installation in Madison Square Park is both a feat of engineering, a play on the notion of resolution, and an ambient meditation on urban life. Made up of a square matrix of 2,000 light sources programmed to convey images of humans and birds moving through the light field, Scattered Light is a piece that needs to be seen in motion to be understood. To that end, we’ve embedded a few videos of the piece for those of you not in NYC at the moment.


Video via A/N Blog.

Architecture of WikiLeaks

Architecture of WikiLeaks: "

© Åke E:son Lindman

Thanks to the New York Post article we noticed that this project Pionen White Mountain, which we featured November 24, 2008, is indeed the WikiLeaks Headquarters.   Pionen – White Mountain designed by Albert France-Lanord Architects is housed in a former 1,200 sqm  Cold War bunker (originally built as a World War II bunker); an amazing location 30 meters down under the granite rocks of the Vita Berg Park in Stockholm.

One of the original founders of WikiLeaks is architect John Young. Sections and more photographs following the break.

Architects: Albert France-Lanord Architects
Location:Stockholm, Sweden
Program: Datacenter
Collaborators: Frida Öster and Jonatan Blomgren
Geology Consultant: Geosigma AB
Construction: Albert France-Lanord Architects
Client: Bahnhof AB
Construction Area: 1,200 sqm
Project year: 2008
Photographs: Åke E:son Lindman

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© Åke E:son Lindman

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floor plans

© Åke E:son Lindman

© Åke E:son Lindman

Architecture of WikiLeaks originally appeared on ArchDaily, the most visited architecture website on 10 Dec 2010.

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