Whyfore

Design Inspiration for the Inventive Mind..

Reverse Graffiti

Graffiti is one of the most controversial art forms. Made most famous by vandals, it tends to be used mostly in a somewhat territorial defacing of property with motivations varying as much as any other art form, if not more. It is one of our most ancient arts, with cave paintings dating back at least 32,000 years, many of them less socially acceptable than the standard bison image that comes to mind.

Reverse graffiti is the art of removing grime or graffiti in such a way that it leaves a message behind. The artist can vary all the way from that kid who scrawls ‘wash me’ with their finger on all the dirty cars they see, to masters like Scott Wade (top) and Alexandre Orion (video below).

As you can see from the video, the legality of reverse graffiti is still leaving officials scratching their heads. Are they really going to arrest you for cleaning the subway? As with anything that irritates people or costs them money (£750,000 to (finish) cleaning the Wills Memorial Building in Bristol) expect them to manage to trump up some kind of charge if you get caught making a nuisance of yourself.

Graffiti writers are not real villains.  Real villains consider the idea of breaking in someplace, not stealing anything and then leaving behind a painting of your name in four foot high letters the most retarded thing they ever heard of. -Banksy

Update: Here’s another good one:

reverse graffiti car

Slow Prototyping with Bees

Rapid prototypers are falling in price, but are still expensive to use, and the field of swarm robotics continues to work on making better bots with more useful emergent behavior, but today, the hardest working hives on the planet are still organic. Tomas Libertiny made a form for his hive in the shape of a vase and then let the bees do the rest. It took 40,000 of the little ladies a week to make the vase. The materials are free, as the bees gather them themselves, and even better, they work for queen and country. I was spoke with a beekeeper this morning who has been working on something similar, and others have made use of the concept in the past, inclding Garnett Puett, who twenty years ago apparently put a queen bee in a life sized cast of his wife and let them sculpt a work known as Apiscaryatid, but I have yet to see a picture. Hilary Berseth has some wonderful slow prototyping work that can be seen here.

I think it would also be fun to use a lost wax process to cast the final product in a more permanent material. Next thing you know, the Danish will be using slow prototyping termites to make their clogs.

Update: It looks like Libertini is still at it. He has taken on a project much like Apiscaryatid, creating a life size figure of Jesus in a glass case entitled Unbearable Lightness. He started with a mesh small enough to trap the queen within, but large enough to allow the workers through. The bees built the honeycomb, filled it with honey, and then removed the honey when they were later relocated, leaving just the honeycomb structure behind. Why he chose the religious iconography I don’t know, but it scares the beeJesus out of me.

And some video as well:

Shadow Sculpting

At first glance, this work of art by Tim Noble and Sue Webster looks like just another nondescript stack of stuff someone is trying to pass off as modern art. The magic happens when the spotlights are turned on.

 

 

When the light is set to hit at just the right angle, the sculpture casts a silhouette in shadow; a self portrait of the artists.

 

 

 

It is an interesting question as to where exactly the art resides in these pieces. There is a sort of gestalt psychology at work here, wherein the wall, the sculpture, and the light are all uninteresting and rather unpleasant in themselves, but together make one of the most thought compelling art techniques I’ve seen. This pile of rubbish, entitled Dirty White Trash [With Gulls], illustrates the extreme versatility of the medium. If you have stuff, and a light source, chances are you have the materials. My expectation is that the artists likely traced each others shadows on the wall and then just started piling up stuff until their outline was obscured by shadow. Other artists and even commercials have used variations of the medium, and I’m surprised it hasn’t become more popular. It might be a fun way to send someone a covert message. I think I might have to find a way to make use of this next Halloween

Wind Powered Machines, the Strandbeesten

When it comes to artists and inventors, Theo Jansen is my unrivaled favorite. Theo would probably object to me putting his work into the perfection category, since he sees better than anyone the endless adjustments and innovations tomorrow will bring for his creations, but I think they qualify. When we look around us, we tend to consider ourselves the most evolved creatures on the planet, because we are intelligent, and we are in control, but in the eyes of evolution, that is simply not the case. There are animals on this planet that have gone nearly unchanged for tens of millions of years, not because they are inferior, but because they have reached a point where they are perfectly evolved to survive in their respective environments. Theo Jansen creates creatures out of tubes and air hoses, check valves and plastic bottles, and then sets them loose on the beach, where they are powered by the wind. The Strandbeesten walk, run, hunker down, and avoid danger, all with a brain made of coke bottles.

Ultrasonic Fog Maker

Every year when Halloween comes around, I carve a watermelon. I don’t have anything against the carving of pumpkins, I just find the watermelon to be a superior choice.

They are easier to carve.

They are more directly edible.

The green on the skin contrasts nicely with the red interior.

The interior looks awesome when lit.

The biggest flaw I’ve found with the watermelon is that it doesn’t take the heat of a candle very well. This year I tried this little ultrasonic fog maker with LED. Even with a windy Halloween, the results were impressive. The interior had a shifting glow in the swirling fog.

When submerged, the device uses ultrasound to resonate the surface of the water and break it into extremely tiny droplets. The fog feels cool to the touch, but not very damp. In my tests, the effect worked through thin solid materials, so you could hide it in a device. It also worked with some success on other liquids (including Vodka). You may have seen these in use in small fountains, or for reptiles, terrariums, or humidifiers.

Update: Here is my watermelon carving for 2009:

Watermelon Jack o lantern 09

For 2009 I had a small melon. I did’t have much room inside for a water reservoir, so I just put the fog maker in a jar of water. I could hear all of the trick or treaters coming because of all of the exclamations ver the smoke coming from the teeth of my watermelon. The empty eye socket was carved to a thin shell so it lit up nicely without being open to the interior.

Festo Air Jelly

Predating the LaChLuVe fish is this Air Jelly made by Festo, a German automation company. The unifying goal of these creations is to achieve neutral buoyancy. From there, propulsion becomes as effortless as it would in zero gravity. This jelly uses helium for buoyancy amd when deflated, weighs in at 1.3 kG. A  Li-poly battery as its only power source, and a series of gears, shafts, and cranks power the arms. It can be steered by control of a pendulum on the underside.

1.3kg gets you a lot more to work with than it used to.

Related Posts:

Festo Air Jellyish

Penguin Robots, Air and Sea

LaChLuVe Air Fish Captivates Airship Regatta

Last week in Friedrichshafen in southern Germany, there was an airship regatta (race). Along with the usual group of speedy nearly uncontrollable little blimps was this beauty which will be sure to be getting a lot of attention in the coming weeks. Team LaChLuVe has set the bar so high with their Fi-Fi- Fin-Fish that the airship races will never be the same, and may have a lot of new applicants. Unlike the propeller driven blimps and zeppelins, the air fish glides through the air propelled by a very natural looking swish of the tail, which also provides steering when holding it in place and gliding. The pectoral fins are servo actuated for additional control. I would be shocked not to see this as a consumer product within the next couple of years, and I can’t wait to see what shows up at the world air games next June.

Update: The Fi-Fi- Fin-Fish was made by Empa (a Swiss materials technology development institution) by using electro-active polymers to power the motion of the tail. When electricity is applied, the polymer contracts like a muscle to give the tail its kick. The fins, in combination with the low center of gravity, do a great job of keeping it upright. There is a further abstract for a more complex system with a flexing body here. A flexing strip along the top and bottom of the fish would be attached to the vertical ribs. The contraction of the polymer would cause the body to flex in a more natural fashion.

Update: The project was a collaboration with the Technical University of Berlin, and has been a several year project. Earlier versions of the fin-fish flew in the ’06 and ’07 regatta. Empa started with a more traditional airship, and got more fishy with each revision. Several tails were tested, as were several different ways of using the electroactive polymer.a

 

 

 

Part of their vision is creating a solar powered version that could operate efficiently and silently for surveillance. There is a growing demand for spy drones, and most of their competitiors sound like flying weed-whackers.

Similar Posts:

Lighter Than Air Penguins by Festo

Lighter Than Air Jellyfish by Festo

The Positive Aspects of Negative Space

Here is something that could have, and very well may have, been invented tens of thousands of years ago. By strategically drilling holes in two sheets of metal, Jiyeon Song creates a static structure, which when the sun hits it at certain angles throughout the day and year, allows light to pass through both layers at predetermined positions. The light and shadows produce the ever shifting words of a poem. I’m not a big fan of poetry, but the time lapse is really worth a look.