Fun with Fero Fluid

“Morpho Towers--Two Standing Spirals” is an installation that consists of two ferrofluid sculptures that moves synthetically to music. The two spiral towers stand on a large plate that hold ferrofluid. When the music starts, the magnetic field around the tower is strengthened. Spikes of ferrofluid are born from the bottom plate and move up, trembling and rotating around the edge of the iron spiral.
The body of the tower was made by a new technique called “ferrofluid sculpture” that enables artists to create dynamic sculptures with fluid materials. This technique uses one electromagnet, and its iron core is extended and sculpted. The ferrofluid covers the sculpted surface of a three-dimensional iron shape that was made on an electronic NC lathe. The movement of the spikes in the fluid is controlled dynamically on the surface by adjusting the power of the electromagnet. The shape of the iron body is designed as helical so that the fluid can move to the top of the helical tower when the magnetic field is strong enough.

The surface of the tower responds dynamically to its magnetic environment.
When there is no magnetic field, the tower appears to be a simple spiral shape. But when the magnetic field around the tower is strengthened, spikes of ferrofluid are born; at the same time, the tower’s surface dynamically morphs into a variety of textures ranging from soft fluid to minute moss, or to spiky shark’s teeth, or again to a hard iron surface. The ferrofluid, with its smooth, black surface that seems to draw people in, reaches the top of the tower, spreading like a fractal, defying gravity.

It's very cool stuff. Can't wait for an excuse to try and use this in a campaign!

The Wood Mirror

An incredible use of technology this. A hexagon made from hundreds of small wooden squares on pivots rotate to form different colours which reflect what a hidden camera in the center of it picks up. somehow the camera is able to assess the colours it 'sees' and rotate every square to mimic it.

The artist has made a whole munch of these, and every single one is fantastic.

Support The Trons: Robot instumentalists

"over and over and over and over, like a monkey with a miniature cymbal"

This is an amazing bit of flash that loops as the user explores it. Machines creating machines creating machines. There is definitely a website in there, or at the very least a cool banner.

GlitchHead

Continuing my pornogrophising of 'Glitch', I give you a beautiful remix of Nude by Radiohead performed by redundant technology. If you're not a fan of Spectrum loading sounds skip on about 40 seconds.






Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

More fun to play with that that ticklish Lynx Slut

Made by McCann Ericsson Japan, EcoZoo is a bit weird in terms of content, but has the quickest, smoothest and most fun navigation I've seen in a long time. It's like the first Black & White game and shows us what papervision and 3D navigation can do in the future.

2009 could be the year of 3D. Sweet.

3D Fetch Boy!

Very well done bit of flash that appears 3D. Whether it is or not I'm not sure, you'd have to take the code apart. Either way it could work as a great nav or a 3D game.

Electro Billboard Hax

Although this hac was paid for media space it would be a great bit of publicity if done right. Perfect for a film or game. Basically some guy was breaking billboards at certain times to show GIF style images from all the pixel blocks. Long live Hax.

Plastic Mech Art

"We're the stars of CCTV"

A Manchester band has found a novel way of using CCTV cameras to their advantage.

Setting up kit and playing to cameras all over Manchester, the band then asked for the footage from the council under the freedom of information act and made a music video out of it.

"We wanted to produce something that looked good and that wasn't too expensive to do," guitarist Tony Churnside explains on the bands MySpace page.

Interestingly, only a quarter of the organisations the band contacted fulfilled their obligation to hand over the footage – perhaps predictably, bigger firms were reluctant, while smaller companies were more helpful – but that still provided enough for a video with 20 locations.

"We had a number of different excuses as to why we weren't given the footage, like they didn't have the footage. They delete after a certain amount of time, so if they procrastinate for long enough, they can claim it's been deleted" the band explained.

The video is below.