One of the amazing highlights at this years Entertainment Gathering was the duo Jake Shimabukuro and Charles Yang who met the day before and magically performed this amazing composition of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”. Anyhow, if you have 5 minutes, turn up your speakers and be ready to be wowed! Charles played several more impromptu times at the Aquarium party and in the hotel lobby.
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One of my favorite talks and demonstrations from this years TED2011 conference came Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, of Handspring Puppet Company
“Puppets always have to try to be alive,” says Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company, a gloriously ambitious troupe of human and wooden actors. Beginning with the tale of a hyena’s subtle paw, puppeteers Kohler and Basil Jones build to the story of their latest astonishment: the wonderfully life-like Joey, the War Horse, who trots (and gallops) convincingly onto the TED stage.
These are beautiful, sustainable, optimizes entirety of wood, and very unique. I love how some of the curves follow the eyes of the wood and grain direction. Who knew you could get flooring like this!
“Bolefloor is the world’s first industrial-scale manufactured hardwood flooring with naturally curved lengths that follow a tree’s natural growth. Bolefloor takes its name from bole, the trunk of a tree.
Bolefloor technology combines wood scanning systems, tailor-made CAD/CAM developments and innovative optimization algorithms for placement software developed by a Finnish engineering automation company and three software companies in cooperation with the Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology.
Bolefloor scanners’ natural-edge visual identification technology evaluates “imperfections” such as knots and sapwood near the edges or ends so that floors are both beautiful and durable.
Our process manages and tracks each board from its raw-lumber stage through final installation. And every board is cut using the finest in Homag woodworking machinery.
Several pictures from their gallery after the jump!
This is very smart. I want some. High end materials, a shelf built from the boxes you transport then in, and you can customize them in a bunch of formats… this just might beat out my desire for the typical IKEA bookshelf though cost a bit more… It would be nice in different colors, or at least just the white portion… I dig the end grains showing.. black, green, and some vibrant colors would be nice!
“BrickBox is a modular bookcase composed of stackable boxes used to transport and store. Brilliant? I would say so!”
via swissmiss
Photographer Stephan Tillmans project “Luminant Point Arrays” captures the flicker of CRT monitor screens right when you turn it off. The results are rather beautiful or perhaps nostalgic. Great series.
LUMINANT POINT ARRAYS
“The Luminant Point Arrays show tube televisions in the moment they are swithed off. The television picture breaks down and creates a structure of light. The pictures refuse external reference and broach the issue of the difference between abstraction and concretion in photography. The breakdown of the television picture discribes the breakdown of the reference. The product is self-referential photography.”
See the images after the jump.
Duane Keiser originated the phenomenon known as “painting a day“.
Keiser recently posted on his blog a short time-lapse video called Peel where he paints the process in peeling apart a tangerine, repainting over the the same painting where the past vanishes just like in real life. He’s also auctioning his final piece which at the moment of the post is at $225.
I’ve seen paintings repainted over, but too paint over purposefully and retain the history through video is a great addition and a great story! If this was done digitally, a buyer could go through each stroke forwards and backwards, but to make it something non-digital retains a history and mystery which at times can be more valuable than information.
“makedo is a connector system that enables materials including cardboard, plastic and fabric to easily join together to form new objects or structures.”
Fun, I wish I had a set to build a big monster from all those cardboard boxes I have.
Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.
“JR, a semi-anonymous French street artist, uses his camera to show the world its true face, by pasting photos of the human face across massive canvases. At TED2011, he makes his audacious TED Prize wish: to use art to turn the world inside out. Learn more about his work and learn how you can join in at insideoutproject.net.”
I’m off to the TED2011 conference, which will be my 10th TED conference. I’ll be stopping by LA this weekend to meet up with some TEDsters, then in Palm Springs all of Sunday to meet with TEDx organizers, then Long Beach for a backstage peek, then back to Palm Springs the rest of the week. Let me know if your going, in LA, or follow me on twitter for updates. And yes, that is me on the back of a shared bike last year cruising around the resort during one of the session breaks with my friend Ash from Australia. Also follow the Facebook Fanpage for occasional quick updates.
Photographer Natsumi Hayashi has an inspiring diary of self-portraits capturing her levitating(in the moment that is). It’s addictive to go through all the photos which renders her like a magical character in a video game floating everywhere. This would be an incredible coffee table book. Awesome work Natsumi. I’d love to levitate with you sometime on Tokyo =)
Look at some many of my favorites after the jump.
This reminds me of the NounProject. Both look great:
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