I’ve got wonderful news! My project, the Anywhere Organ has just gotten funding from the Awesome Foundation. For those of you who don’t know the Awesome Foundation is a fabulous collection of folks who choose a new project every month and get it started with $1000 with no strings attached.

The Fun Theory Group was founded to gently change people’s behavior through fun and play. They seek to create a public dialog of interaction with open art installations. I’ve been nominated for a grant to help me create something called the Anywhere Organ.

I’ve designed a pipe organ that can be installed into any space, a fire escape, an abandoned warehouse, a drawbridge, turning the entire space into an aspect of the larger instrument. Pipe organs have always fascinated me and it will become a tremendous instrument for getting people to play with space and sound. I’ll be collaborating with Brooklyn musicians to record the sound it makes and put on interactive shows with the organ. Still, I need you to vote for the project to make it happen. Take a look here http://bit.ly/6CDc08 and rate the project.

Thanks for looking. Thanks for reading.

-M@

Download the files from Thingiverse here.

See the whole set on Flickr.

A few months ago I published some experiments I’d been doing emulating MIT’s Bokode technology at home. For those of you who don’t know Bokode is a method developed in the Camera Culture Group at the Media Lab that tucks huge amounts of readable graphic information into a space as small as a LED. This is done by using tiny printed info just behind a lens and just in front of a strong light. When you point a camera at the lens and pull out of focus the lens projects a blown up image of the microprint on your camera’s film plane.

You might have noticed the blurry blobs that show up on film when you take a picture of distant lights or pinpoint bright spots that aren’t quite in focus. This effect is called Bokeh, after the Japanese word for blurry. You can find details on how it works here, and details on how MIT used this effect and turned it into a way to create passive, unobtrusive tagging with Bokode here.

I love the new set of home fabrication 3d printers that are emerging. RepRap is a pretty fascinating project. Makerbot is amazing, affordable, and the folks who operate the company are the salt of the earth (though they don’t cause crops to wither.)  At the moment the machines are pretty basic. They’re not very well suited to jobs that require strength or precision. However, the quality of their output is improving daily and given how easy they are to modify and how open the projects are people come along regularly, releasing their experiments and improving the designs by leaps and bounds.  I thought I’d create a design that creates a working mechanism using only printed parts from these machines. This pair of handcuffs is downloadable, printable, and functional. If you print a copy of your own please let me know.

Ferret7 fabricated his own set! Hot!

Jake Appelbaum posted some incredibly hispeed film of himself on twitter. I just had to do a cut.

On YouTube and Vimeo.