Girl, I really want to let you know how I feel, but I’m scared. Y’see, you’re so beautiful. If I had you, I might be worried I’d never find someone like you again if I lost you. Oh god, Karin, I want you so bad.
So here we have the Karin by Citroën. It’s a prototype car developed for the 1980 Paris Salon that was built for display (as a prototype only), as Citroën had no new models to reveal that year. The result is pretty amazing.
It’s a three-seater with the driver being seated centrally and ahead of the two passengers.
Karin, if you were mine, I wouldn’t need anyone else.
When I was 7 years old, my piano teacher broke up with her boyfriend, and he had left his (1st generation) Game Boy at her place. So she gave it to me (can I get a whooop whoooop!), because she knew that I preferred spending time in front of the TV playing Super Nintendo, rather than practicing the piano. It already had Zelda inside it, which I couldn’t figure out how to beat for the life of me, but I didn’t care one bit, because I held the Holy Grail of entertainment in my little hands – and it was my new best friend.
I still remember the subway ride home after that day’s piano lesson, and how incredibly cool I felt. Then came the Game Boy Pocket in 1996, which was offered in every color of the rainbow(!), followed by the revolutionary Game Boy Color in 1998. That was when shit got serious, and I was no longer the only girl in my class with a Game Boy, because the other girls finally understood why I didn’t want to sit around and trade stickers or play MASH anymore during recess, and they joined me in the cubby corner for some Super Mario Bros. Deluxe.
I wish I could say, “Yaaay Game Boy! Still going strong!”, but with the creation of the Nintendo DS (which is still probably loads of fun, don’t get me wrong) the Game Boy will never be what it used to be. But we had some damn good times growing up — together.
While walking around this past sunday we came across a new silver-door building with the words “Boiler Room - pierogi 2000″ written on a piece of paper. I stepped inside. My mouth dropped at the space inside.
As you walk in, you’re greeted by a really really large industrial boiler. Then you walk slightly past to find yourself in a vastly empty room with huge amounts of space above you.
Hanging from the ceiling is a scary doomsday-looking device with flickering blue squares all over it.
It looks like an old World War II underwater mine.
And it looks like it’s about to hit the ground and blow.
Walk up to it and you notice there are hundreds (215) of individual CRT monitors. Next to each monitor is a CCD camera. Your screen shows what is on the exact opposite side of the ball, and hence it’s name: The Invisible Sphere. It’s definitely worth seeing. Check out the extra photos below:
Also in the space is an amazing demonstration of the power of solar power by Tavares Strachan entitled “The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want (Arctic Ice Project)”. Enclosed within a “walk-in” style freezer with plate glass windows, you see a giant block of ice. This ice was harvested from Alaska over 4 years ago. Since then, it was transported to the Bermuda Islands, where it sat inside this freezer, and was kept frozen with nothing more than solar power. The exhibit has moved here, and still, the same thing. The solar power arrays are on the roof (a video feed proves it) and you can see all of the hardware which converts the sunlight into energy, and an array of backup batteries which store excess energy from the day for the night. Really clever. Why the hell doesn’t every building have solar panels yet? They’re cheap. On Amazon you can get a home power array for like $1000! Shit, makes me want to install a grid at my apartment and start selling my extra energy back to ConEd, or just leaving my air conditioner on all the time so I can have my own block of Alaskan ice in my apartment, too with zero ecological footprint!
You can see the exhibit at 191 N. 14th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Bag Raiders are the hottest DJs from Modular Records right now, and they’re stopping by Brooklyn tonight on their US tour. These guys have an awesome sound, the dance floor is going to looove them, for sure!
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While TVOTR isn’t exactly the type of band I’d expect to hear remixed in a club anywhere, I just stumbled across the news that they’ll be releasing a new EP with three remixed tracks from Dear Science. The tracks aren’t their hit singles, and they’re not being remixed by any huge blog-house names, either. No Crookers or Justice names on this EP. The album, called “Read Silence” is available for digital download on April 14th. Good stuff. Here’s to ”the most vital, current band in America”.
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So pissed I missed these guys at Studio B last month. Oh well. Here’s a great mix by them that’ll get you going anytime.
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Intro – Title Music from A Clockwork Orange
1. Revolte – Weak Generation
2. Michael Jackson – Thriller (instrumental)
3. Chromatics – In The City (The Twelves Replay)
4. Datarock – I Used to Dance with my Daddy (Metal on Metal Remake)
5. Lifelike – So Electric
6. Theatre of Disco – YOA (The Twelves Remix)
7. Boys Noize – Feel Good (TV Off)
8. Thieves Like Us – Drugs in my Body (The Twelves Replay)
9. Le Knight Club – Rhumba
10. Les Rhythmes Digitales – Hypnotize
11. Black Kids – I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You (The Twelves Replay)
12. M.I.A. – Boyz (The Twelves Replay)
Here’s something I had seen a while ago, but was reminded of it today for some reason. Made using ferrofluid and high-strength electromagnets with variable power levels rigged to microphones and video cameras, it’s definitely one of the coolest art projects I’ve seen in a while, and it must be amazing to see in person. If you’re squeamish about weird moving liquid stuff that looks alive, may want to look away or curl into a ball and hide your eyes. You know who you are.
Concept of Art:
Modeling physical material more freely and making it move more flexibly is a dream long sought after by human beings, and many artists have created surreal illusions in pictures or moving images. But those were imaginary. Can we obtain a real object that transforms as we designed it? <Protrude, Flow>is an interactive installation which expresses the dynamics of fluid motion of physical material, the dynamics of organic, wild shapes and movements of liquid by means of digital computer control.
<Protrude, Flow> uses magnetic fluid, sound, and moving images. Affected by the sounds and spectators’ voices in the exhibition place, the three-dimensional patterns of magnetic fluid transform in various ways, and simultaneously its flowing movement and dynamic transformations are projected on the wide screen.
The magnetic fluid appears as a black fluid. It is made by dissolving ferro magnetic micro-powder in a solvent such as water or oil, and it remains strongly magnetic even in the fluid condition. Therefore, it is more flexibly transformable than iron sand and so it is possible to create more complicated three-dimensional organic patterns. That appear occasionally as pointed mountains or pliable organic shapes, sometimes as flowing particle streams.
The transformation of magnetic fluid is caused by the interaction with environmental sound. The sounds in the exhibition place (sounds created by artists, and voices of spectators) are caught by a microphone hanging from the ceiling, and then a computer converts the sound amplitude to electromagnetic voltage which determines the strength of the magnetic field. At the same time, the magnetic fluid changes its three-dimensional patterns sequentially. Each pattern appears synchronized to the environmental sound and the points of the shapes move correspondingly. As a result, magnetic fluid pulsates according to the sound. A digital video camera captures images of the moving magnetic fluid, and projects it on the screen.
While I sincerely hope that this is not going to be the future of DJing, it’s still pretty neat. It essentially does everything that two turntables, a mixer, an iPod, and a hard drive could do – except make you look like a legitimate DJ. With a whopping 120Gb hard drive (or 60Gb for $100 less), it already holds more music than the average person’s mp3 player, and Tonium, the company that created it, was thoughtful enough to include both headphone and line outs. It’s all there: LCD screen, touchpad, crossfader, kill switch, auto-beatmatching (in case don’t want to make use of the nice visual display that’s provided), loop setting/editing, cues – the works. More heavy-duty editing and settings are accessible through the included software, as well as the ability to transfer your fresh mixes from the Pacemaker to your laptop. The battery doesn’t crap out until you hit the 5-hour mark, but that’s longer than your friends will want to hear you deejay anyway (assuming you won’t actually dare to use this at a live gig in lieu of a real set-up) so for $700, you’re good to go. For a closer look, click on the images below.
