Slow Dance – a most unusual device designed by artist and roboticist Jeff Lieberman for Wonder Machines which uses some kind of imperceptible vibrating witchcraft to make objects placed in contact with its demonic gubbins appear to move in slow motion.
One of a series of ‘futurist films’ by global design collective Universal Everything exploring human-machine collaboration through performance and emerging technologies. To wit:
A dancer teaches a series of three robots (in this case, Izzy) how to move. As the robots’ abilities develop from shaky mimicry to composed mastery, a physical dialogue emerges between man and machine – mimicking, balancing, challenging, competing, outmanoeuvring…
…killing all humans, etc.
Previously: More Than Human
An installation by global design collective Universal Everything currently running at the Barbican in London as part of the AI: More Than Human exhibition.
Visitors are presented with a gyrating, wiggling abstract animation that tracks and mimics their movements via 47,000 possible variations.
The animation becomes more agile as it learns the specific movements of the observer. The exhibition runs until the end of August, if you’re passing.
Robotic band Compressorhead cover Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ at a concert in Moscow back in 2014.
Previously: Heavy Metal
A Rubik’s Cube solving robot built by MIT mechanical engineering student Ben Katz and electrical engineering student Jared Di Carlo of MIT.
Don’t blink as the machine solves the puzzle in a world record beating 0.38 seconds: first in real time, then at 0.25x speed, in case you missed it, then 0.003x speed, in case you missed that.
The iconic lightsaber battle of Vader and Obi Wan from ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’ (1977) impressively enhanced and extended with deepfake technology by Christopher Clements of FixItInPost.
And here’s the 42-year-old original for comparison.
Aerial views of the 1,600 hectare BrightSource Ivanpah solar plant in California’s Mojave desert by German photographer Bernhard Lang.
Bulk Handling Systems’ sorting robot Max-AI AQC-C – designed to operate safely alongside human co-workers on the sorting lines of recycling plants.
Ah yeah.
Plastic packaging today, skulls tomorrow.
Footage (which would, in fairness, have been geeky and recondite even at the time) of a 1991 meeting of 8-track aficionados, including obligatory Eric Estrada fangirl and 8-track auteur Russ Furster at Delilah’s of Chicago.
The 8-track format was popular from the 1960s to the early 1980s, when it was replaced by cassette tapes.
You know, cassette tapes.
Rattle, rattle. Where the ribbon used to get snagged on the yoke and you had to stick in a pencil and wind the…
Never mind.
