theo’s gallimaufry

The Chipophone is a homemade 8-bit synthesizer, especially suited for live chiptune playing. It has been built inside an old electronic organ.

A chiptune, or chip music, is music written in sound formats where many of the sound textures are synthesized or sequenced in real time

You can find more information about how the organ was modified on the making of page.

If you take a cavalier approach to cartography, London and Paris look pretty similar.

Beard Revue is a place for art, apparel, ephemera and the occasional review for beard and moustache enthusiasts.

In May of 1974, after reading through a pilot script written by John Cleese and his then-wife, Connie Booth, a clearly unimpressed 'comedy script editor' by the name of Ian Main sent the following memo to BBC Television's Head of Comedy and Light Entertainment.

For more gems like this, have a butcher's at Letters of Note.

Insert 0,50 EUR to sit.

For me, this puts Fabian up there with Thomas Midgley, Jr - the guy who put lead in petrol, and invented CFC's. Take note Fabian, an obituary in Time reported that Midgley succumbed to accidental strangulation "by a self-devised harness for getting in and out of bed."

Not only is this a great anthropological story, but also an apt analogy of how some modern Western businesses/marketing agencies operate:

"In WW2, planes started to land on New Guinea and Melanesian islands, where they had never landed before. The planes - not understood by the islanders - brought wonders and wealth that the islanders had never seen. Manufactured clothing, canned food, tents, weapons suddenly arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers. But it also tantalized the islanders who were their guides and hosts. And then suddenly the war ended... and so did the planes and the wealth.

Well the islanders had no idea where all this incredible bounty came from, but they had to develop some theories. And they came to believe that if they could just duplicate the airstrips, they could get the same thing to happen again. Maybe they believed that the foreigners got the bounty from the "ancestors", and if they had airstrips they could encourage the ancestors to visit directly.

You can imagine them trying to get it right - building the towers, "turning on" the landing signals. They even carved headphones from wood. If only they could get what it was that made those planes arrive.

As told to me by the walking encyclopedia that is Darren Savage via the ineffable Richard Feynman.

According to Garvin, the video installation "crossroads (what to do)" deals with the influence of others onto one's own path of life in an abstract way.

via acidolatte.blogspot.com

Benedetta Bonichi 's obsession with ancient history, anthropology, philosophy of language, and the paleontology ethology has led to a most intriguing exploration of anatomical art.

Also worth pointing back to the Eizo X-Ray Calendar.

Quadricopters are my new favourite kind of rotors. This clip features the control of multiple quadrotor robots to cooperatively transport a payload. A gripping mechanism attached to each quadrotor permits grasping of the payload.

Work done at GRASP Lab (The General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Laboratory), University of Pennsylvania.

I love how this inverts the current application of 3D technology. Why simply bring things out into the user's space? Why not let the user invade the technological space?

"What would it be like to reach into a screen and manipulate virtual objects as in real world. We present Beyond, a novel collapsible input device for direct 3D manipulation. When pressed against a screen, Beyond collapses in the physical world and extends into the digital space of the screen, such that users can have an illusion that they are inserting the tool into the virtual space. Beyond allows users to directly interact with 3D media, avoiding inconsistencies of input and output without having to wear special glasses. Users can select, draw, and sculpt in 3D virtual space and seam- lessly transition between 2D and 3D manipulation. We de- scribe detailed interaction techniques, implementation and application scenarios focused on geometric design and prototyping." 

- Jihna Lee. 

Jinha is an interaction designer and computer scientist working at MIT Media Lab. He is crazy about levitation, media arts, physics, linguistics, italian films, piano, mythologies, kimchi and natto.