Syzygryd Software Preview from nicole aptekar on Vimeo.

Currently in the Bay Area, a team of artists, engineers, hackers, musicians, designers and makers of all stripes is working around the clock to produce an ambitious interactive sound/light/fire sculpture called Syzygryd. As you read this, chances are someone is welding, grinding, riveting, plasma cutting, wiring up LED lighting, finalizing the touchscreen control panels, or installing fire effects at the Nimby DIY space in Oakland, where the project is rapidly coming together – tube by tube, cube by cube, burst by burst of flame.

A collaboration between Interpretive Arson, False Profit Labs, Gray Area Foundation For The Arts (GAFFTA), and Illutron, this 2.5-ton, 60-foot sculpture will act as a giant electronic musical instrument. Designed as a traveling installation, Syzygryd will debut at Burning Man in under a month. The Syzygryd user experience, as explained by Interpretive Arson’s Morley John, will be as follows: “Three strangers [will] come together and visually compose a unique piece of music. The beauty of Syzygryd is that the entire sculpture responds to what you’re creating in sequenced light and fire. Each touchscreen controller has a grid of buttons which allow you to input musical patterns.” The initial Syzygryd proposal elaborates further:

Syzygryd is a collaborative musical instrument for three non-professional players. We are not naive. We’re not shoving guitars into the hands of novices and expecting symphonies. This is a very carefully designed canvas that guides beginners to harmony (in fact, discordant notes are literally impossible.) The interface is rhythmic, visual, and dead simple. We’ve been meticulously developing the software for months, playing with iPhone prototypes on busses, tweaking sounds, testing it out on our friends. We knew we were getting warmer the first time that three people, with no formal training in music, got bystanders grooving involuntarily…

Though most of the heavy lifting takes place Oakland, people from around the world are invited to contribute to the build.

How can you help build Syzygryd? By submitting sound sets. You’re basically submitting 3 (or more) types of sounds that mesh well together, and people will make music with them. For Syzygryd’s sound palette is not limited to the three electronic tones you hear in the software demo above. You can make it play anything: chirping bird noises, breathing, machine/factory sounds… the more creative the combination, the better. To submit a set, all you need to do is have Ableton Live, download Syzygryd’s MDK (Musician Developer Kit), and consult this handy video tutorial for extra help as needed. There’s also a forum where you can ask questions and get advice. All submitted sets will be reviewed by Syzygryd’s Music Team, and a selection of the top sets will played by the sculpture.

Having observed and participated in the Syzygryd project build, it’s clear that everyone involved is deeply invested in crafting an experiential zone that will be the first of its kind. As the proposal states, “[Syzygryd is] the most beautiful expression we can imagine of the joy we take in community, music, technology, fire, sculpture and architecture. We have assembled an international team of artists with extraordinary talent and experience. All of us are in love. Every day we see things that no one has yet imagined, and it’s been our delight to work within a community to make them real. We’d like to create a space in our city where others — people who don’t normally do this sort of thing — can feel at least a little of that.” That’s a wonderful thing to be part of on any level, and in Syzygryd’s case, people from around the world can get involved.

The deadline for submitting sounds sets to Syzygryd is Tuesday, August 24th. More info on the sculpture and music submission process, after the jump!

(via Jill Tracy and BB.)

In this hilarious Sunsweet commercial from 1967, stylish space mod people frolic through a seri3z ov to0bz, and an indignant Ray Bradbury finds himself hawking The Prunes of Tomorrow. (Tomorrow being the year 2001, natch.) Prune fart-powered jet-packs are not envisioned in this scenario BUT THEY SHOULD BE, DAMN IT.

It’s all about robots and sugar cubes this afternoon. A crunchy animation with a 60′s space age feel, Une Mission Ephémère was crafted in 1993 by Polish animator Piotr Kamler and scored by experimental/musique concrète composer Bernard Parmegiani. The best part of this clip is watching the way the robot’s facial expressions change as he sculpts playthings and conducts experiments while floating in his little bowl. More clips by Kamler – including Chronopolis, which was his first and only full-length feature – can be found at UbuWeb. Chronopolis and Kamler’s work is often characterized as “science fiction,” but have more in common with Borges than with Star Wars, as one excellent write-up on Kamler notes. [Another hat-tip to Wobbly.]

Ellis Nadler’s fictitious deck of divination cards is a perfect combination of woodcut aesthetic and Hieronymus Bosch insanity; the tools of fortunetellers from some far-off, imaginary realm. Beautifully rendered they are the kind of work that begs to be made into a physical object.

via A Journey Round My Skull

Update: Reader Fritz Bogott contacted Mr. Nadler and posted his response in the comments:

“‘They are currently being made as a hand-printed fine art limited edition (details available later this year). However, due to great interest from people visiting my website I have now made them available to buy online as high quality digital prints. Just follow this link.’“

There can be no doubt that the fine folks at The Asylum are fans of the special breed of 50s era science fiction; an era in which the mysterious atom reigned supreme. So intrinsic to the conclusion of WWII, a symbol of American dominance and ingenuity, and a portent of The Future the atom was also viewed with fear, and whole oeuvres were built around the concept of atomic energy run amok, creating vast, horrifying menageries of over-sized, irradiated monsters. What else but fanatical love for this bygone age could explain the existence of films like Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus or the soon to be classic Mega Piranha starring former pop icon Tiffany and former Brady Buncher Barry Williams? How else would one explain the decidedly sub-par visual effects except as a desire to retain the essence of those films? This, dear readers, is devotion. This is love. Now to patiently await the remake of Them!.

I always thought danger along the frontier was something that was a lot of fun; an exciting adventure, like in the three-D shows.” A wan smile touched her face for a moment. “Only it’s not, is it? It’s not the same at all, because when it’s real you can’t go home after the show is over.”

“No,” he said. “No, you can’t.”

Story goes like this: there’s an emergency ship en route to a plague-ridden planet, carrying essential medicine. The pilot finds a stowaway; a young girl, Marilyn, who just wants to see her brother.

The pilot now has a problem: he has enough fuel to get himself to the planet, but no one else. Interstellar law is clear: all stowaways are jettisoned immediately.

But space captains are heroic sorts. Whatever harsh decisions the author puts in their background to prove their grit, this is still a story. This time will be different. Marilyn is the perfect, plucky sidekick-in-training; surely the pilot can figure out some way to save both her and the planet’s populace.

No. There is no solution. She says her goodbyes and is ejected, with “a slight waver to the ship as the air gushed from the lock, a vibration to the wall as though something had bumped the outer door in passing, then there was nothing and the ship was dropping true and steady again.”

The above is from Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations. When it came out in Astonishing Science Fiction in August, 1954, it shocked the hell out of the magazine’s readership, used to the last-minute triumph of human ingenuity.

Godwin’s classic was only the beginning. The ensuing decades would see American sci-fi delve into realms unthinkable to its forebears. Desperate to shake off the genre “urinal,” as Kurt Vonnegut so succinctly termed it, writers first ditched one of the key assumptions: that the hero will always save the day. Maturity, in this view, meant uncomfortable truths. Often, it meant unhappy endings, not just for the protagonists, but frequently the entire world.

This is a scattershot story of how the bleak tomorrow came to reign, and how it changed our visions of the future.

I’m really not sure what I have to say to properly convey the danger of robots to you people. Really, at this point I feel that the risks should be self-evident; but almost on a daily basis I am proven wrong. You just do not seem to understand where this road leads to and my words appear impotent, unable to realize the dark future I see should mankind continue down this path towards sentient mechanical beings.

And yet, I find myself unable to just give up. Someone has to be the voice of reason, if only to be able to point out that they told you so; and that person might as well be me if only because I like being right and I am an accomplished pointer, if I do say so myself. With that in mind follow my index finger and gaze in horror and wonder at the sculptures of Andrew Chase. Chase, unlike most who crusade for our demise by automatons, has his sights set squarely on the animal kingdom, making him, perhaps, even more despicable — for what kind of man would set such a plague upon the beasts of the Earth, innocent and pure as they are? Chase has no such qualms, creating giant, lumbering steel pachyderms and lithe, gear-driven, and indefatigable cheetahs. The savannas of the future will be occupied by metal giraffes, wading through the corpses of extinct fauna to hunt down the last of humanity with laser eyes under a smog-choked and blackened sky, mark my words.

And you’ll have only yourselves — and Andrew Chase — to blame.

BERG co-founder Matt Jones just forwarded me a missive from one Ms. Daisy Ginsberg, an artist and scholar who uses design concepts to “explore the implications of emerging and unfamiliar technologies, science and services. She is fascinated by the macroscopic view, the larger-scale social, cultural and ethical consequences of engineering invisible organisms.”

Ginsberg and a handful of fellow researchers are putting out a call for artists, designers and scientists to collaborate on a well-funded synthetic biology exchange program called “Synthetics Aesthetics“. The project sounds like it will offer immense potential for personal growth, as well as aid other up-and-comers from a wide range of disciplines in developing completely new ways of thinking about and approaching the relatively newborn field of creative synthetic biology.

What is synthetic biology, exactly? Read on:

Synthetic Biology is a new approach to engineering biology, generally defined as the application of engineering principles to the complexity of biology. Biology has become a new material for engineering. From the design of biological circuits made from DNA to the design of entire systems, synthetic biology is very much interested in making biology something that can be designed.

Traditional engineering disciplines have tackled design by working alongside designers and developing longstanding and mutually-beneficial collaborations. Synthetic Aesthetics – a research project jointly run by the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Stanford University, California – aims to bring together synthetic biologists, social scientists, designers, artists, and other creative practitioners, to explore existing and potential collaborations between synthetic biology and the creative professions. Interaction between these two broad fields has the potential to lead to new forms of engineering, new schools of art and design, a greater social scientific understanding of science and engineering, and new approaches to societal engagement with synthetic biology.

This website provides detailed information on the project… and useful information on synthetic biology and its relationship to art and design. As the project develops, the site will feature the results of our work and track the collaborations we establish.

Intrigued? Read their FAQ here. Specifically, they are looking for twelve people: six synthetic biologists and six designers/artists to take part in collaborative two week residencies. You have until March 31st to apply.

If hundreds of pages of Philip K. Dick have taught me anything it’s that in the inevitable overpopulated, smoggy, and rain soaked future advertising will be everywhere. Surrounded by it, we will be assaulted by high-tech neon shillery to the point of utter desensitization. Advertisers will have to think up increasingly invasive ways to grab the attention of eyeballs shielded by shiny, all-weather sunglasses and absurd personal computer visors. Short of implanting the desire for a particular product directly into our cerebellums with a biochemical cocktail delivered by evil looking needles, they will no doubt turn to something akin to what is on display here in this video by Scott Amron.

Bypassing the optic route all together, Amron advocates a more tactile approach; his beverage container swelling with protuberances in an allergic reaction to hot liquid, pushing their tumescent ridges into the palm of the purchaser’s hand, creasing it with ad-man braille. Coffee clenched in hand it is all you can do to keep from shrieking as it gropes you. Unable to tear you away from the horrid alien porn displayed on your visor screen while you wait for the bus the next step is no doubt to simply envelop your extremity and forcibly drag you away to some previously unknown destination to buy jeans.

via core77

In honor of Alex Chilton’s passing, we’d like to publish this article written by Joshua Ellis. This article appeared in Coilhouse Issue 04. You can also view a PDF of this article, by a strange twist of fate, over at the official Pixies website. It’s not an article about him, or The Pixies, per se. However, we’ve been wanting to publish this article on our blog for a while now, and this feels like the right moment to do so. This article speaks to the heart of why we’re all here together. What’s that song? / I’m in love / With that song…

I have this memory, and I’m not sure if it’s even real–or if it’s real, if it’s cobbled together from a half-dozen memories, fragments of things that happened over the course of a year or two that began the summer before I started high school, in 1991.

In this memory, I’m sitting in the basement of a girl named Sara, who pronounced her name “Saah-rah” and had purple hair and smoked clove cigarettes. I didn’t know Sara very well, but she was part of a small collective of freaks and weirdos that I had congregated to when I moved that summer from my ancestral home of north Texas to the small mountain town of Hamilton, Montana.

I’m sitting in Sara’s basement with my friends: Jeremy, the pretty guy who wears big black woolen overcoats and Jamaican tam o’ shanters in bright yellow and red and green, and seems to have unlimited access to the panties of every single girl in the Bitterroot Valley; Wade, who perpetually sports Birkenstock loafers that look like inflated bladders and drives a white Volkswagen Beetle covered in Grateful Dead stickers; Nate, who is one of the best guitarists I’ve ever met and is a huge aficionado of what will later come to be known as “extreme” sports, like bouncing down jagged rock faces on a beat-up skateboard deck; Sarah and her sister, Jenny, who are both fond of dropping random giggly non sequiturs into the conversation when stoned.

They’re all here, or some of them, or none of them. We’re sitting in the dark, talking bohemian bullshit, maybe smoking pot. It’s the kind of night that gets put on endless repeat when you’re young and strange and condemned to spend your adolescence in some far-flung desolate shithole like Hamilton, Montana, where you can’t lose yourself in the noise or happily become part of it, the way you can in New York or Seattle or Los Angeles or Chicago.

I’m not as cool as they are. I don’t know about cool shit. I’m just this uptight kid from J. R. Ewing Land who talks too much, still wears Bugle Boy button-downs and M. C. Hammer pants, and has only the dimmest idea that there’s some entire world out there of cool shit that I know nothing about. I own a Jane’s Addiction album and I’ve vaguely heard of the Sex Pistols.

And in this memory, Sara gets up and puts a cassette tape into her boom box. It’s a time traveler from 1984, beaten and scuffed, with the inevitable broken-off cassette door, so you just slap the tape in and hope that the tape head keeps it from falling out, which will cause the relentless motors to chew the tape and unspool it like the entrails of a slaughtered pig. Sara slaps the tape in and hits play.

This song comes out–a slow beat, big and echoing, then a bass playing eighth notes, and then a guitar, dreamy and vibrating. It sounds like what I imagine sunrise on a beach would be like, like what I imagine doing heroin would be like, like what I imagine sex in a dark room with that awesome girl you lie awake and dream of meeting would be like. I haven’t experienced any of these things–yet.

And then a voice, a high husky man’s voice, gentle over the music.

Cease to resist, given my good-byes
Drive my car into the o-o-sha-hah-hahn
You think I’m dead, but I sail away
On a wave of mutilation, wave of mutilation
Wave of mutilation
Way-hey-hey-hey-have
Way-hey-hey-hey-have

“What is this?” I ask. Sara shrugs.

“It’s the Pixies,” she says in this memory that may not even be real, or maybe didn’t happen this way at all. “The song’s called ‘Wave of Mutilation.’ This is the U.K. Surf Mix. The real version is faster and louder.”

“I’ve never heard of them,” I said. “I’ve never heard this.”

“They’re pretty cool,” Sara says. “I think they’re from, like, Boston.”

I nod. Pretty cool.