abstrakt: free experimental art game for iphone
Abstrakt, created by a group of students at the French games and media school ENJMIN, is a free application that allows players to interact with abstract art and music. (...) Each of the game’s included art pieces can be touched and dragged in order to add color, rearrange geometric elements, or reposition lines. (...) Abstrakt contains artwork from Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian, with each piece offering different mechanics and interactive elements. (via bestiphoneappmatic)
the burj birdmen: base jumping off burj dubai
Two men travel to Dubai to attempt a world record base jump off the worlds tallest buidling - The Burj Tower. Director's cut of the award winning Current TV broadcast.
brent stirton's photos of vanishing ethiopian tribes
Brent Stirton is a senior staff photographer for Getty Images and a LIFE.com contributor who routinely spends nine months of the year on assignment, all over the world, covering everything from narco-wars in Afghanistan to "fog harvesting" in Nepal. In 2007, Stirton spent two weeks in Ethiopia's Omo River Valley, documenting tribal groups that still live largely as they have for centuries. "This is a woman of the Mursi tribe, wearing boar's tusks, which traditionally would be considered men's decoration. The Mursi women are famous for their clay lip plates, a symbol of beauty. A woman would literally have a little hand bag with three or four of them featuring different designs. Sort of their own version of Prada." (via life.com)
mad catz' cyborg r.a.t. gaming mouse: if life has steam achievements, this will unlock them all
New line of Mad Catz gaming mice ships in Spring 2010, different models between 50 to 130 euros. The knobs, the color combination, the hidden needles! (via gizmodo)
tina root sings reaping beauty about bayonetta (and tina fey)
Last year at Comic-Con, everyone was talking about Bayonetta, this new game about a witch who comes back from hell and tries to find her way home. Beefy, Random and I wrote this song about how Bayonetta looks like Tina Fey and got Tina Root from the 90s industrial band Switchblade Symphony (back with the LA band Small Halo) to sing the hook which she wrote. The song was produced by Jason Bazinet from SMP. (download reaping beauty from mclars.com via kotaku)
the future is nao
The robot ad that ROCKS because of the soundtrack, a perfect blend of Boy Robot, Hecq and Lassigue Bendthaus. The rest? Oh, the rest. SingularityHub has a longer article on NAO: movable telepresence, facial recognition, text-to-speech translation sound solid, 15 thousand dollars for it more so. Check the ad in which robots lie and then humans get the moral upper end by literally kicking them in the back.
dubai: xero error, dubai 2010 and the star wars mockups
I wanted you to see Cédric Delsaux's Dubai Star Wars mockups first. IO9 has a longer post for you with all the construction images Delsaux so eloquently filled with Vaders, AT-ATs and Jawas. Among other geeky boytoys.
This satire of the classic Hollywood movie trailer was created by Dubai-based post-production house Rolling Thunder. The tongue-in-cheek clip depicts a futuristic Dubai, complete with skyscrapers, space shuttles and underwater space stations. The creative concept, script and all VFX shots were done in-house, supervised by Hermann Venter and Henrik Friberg. (read io9's comments for the starship homages)
In the future Artificial intelligence [AI] is superceded by Natural intelligence [NI]. The story centers on XE7, a cyborg on a spiritual journey who discovers the unknown. He begins to realize that things in recorded history contradict with facts he has observed in real life and begins to open up his mind to the supernatural. He finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, at a major crime scene, leading him to a Cyber-terrorism scandal and trouble with FACET - The First Authority in Cyber Espionage and Terrorism. Packaged as a slick, futuristic thriller, the compelling storyline keeps you guessing till the end. (xero-error.com, extra info in the article via thenational.ae)
UPDATE 1: Just seeing there was a SF short released in Dubai entitled Alliance, any more infos about that, anyone? (The film, set in the 24th century, begins with a planet under attack from a shadowy extra terrestrial race who launch brutal and inexplicable raids on Earth at the same time that a decades-old anarchist movement plunges the planet into cycles of terrorist attacks and destruction.)
the marionette unit: steampunk ballet torture film
SYNOPSIS: This film is set in an alternate Victorian England, a world where steam-punk technology has developed rapidly and in a world where all creativity, art and individual expression is state-controlled. The Marionette Unit is a theatre show where machine and human have been fused together. A musical machine that resembles a twisted tortured church organ, run with valves, steam and electricity, is connected by a mass of electrical cables to three ballet dancers, who have the wires fused into their bodies. The dancers are controlled by the machine much to the amazement of the Victorian audience.
We follow the story of Smith, an enigmatic character connected to an underground society of artists, hunted by the police. He has come to watch the prize ballet dancer, Georgette try and escape the wired clutches of The Marionette Unit. Will she be able to wrestle free and escape with Smith, or will she succumb to the powerful forces that hold her captive? What follows is a stunning and imaginative display of the human spirit fighting to be set free. (the marionette unit official site via io9)
the first post of 2010: the machine that turns itself off
Instructables has instructions for building this Claude Shannon-style box that turns itself off. (via boingboing)
2009, missing post #21: malevolent mechanized pets
Next time you see a seemingly ordinary house cat or backyard crow, consider Ryan Abegglen's mechanical beasts. These robotic soldiers of fortune are outfitted with an amusing array of abilities, from cheetah-blood powered combustion engines to explosive turd bombs. (ryan abegglen via io9(
2009, missing post #20: veqtor's new album
You must surely remember Veqtor from the London edition of The Dose and his weird, distorted ways of cochlear communication, halfway between jazz thinking, glitch and 8-bit tunes. Now he's got his new album, Parsuitel Orbitelum out for free download out on his label, OXO Unlimited and if you want to say goodbye to 2009 with insane chiptunes (Preprocessor is my fave but the beginning AG Racing is not halfbad for an 8-bit GTA cover song, either!), download the whole pack! I'd say Definite is the best-rolling song of all and anything's that's gone acidways needs some work on it, let those tracks be more strict, the basslines more tense, the wickedness is there already. Oh and those missing The Dose - we're there to promise you lovely little things in 2010. If we get there. (Below, a collaboration of Veqtor and Mathtiiaas Rosén, using a crappy cellphone, upsampled using geniune fractals, then run through max/msp+jitter patch. Stock footage from archive.org has been run through an atari2600 emulator being data-bent and repositioning the footage. Still rocking stuff, though!)
2009, missing post #18: teufels dreizack, yelworc on the rise
One of the new tracks by the accomplished German occult industrial/EBM group yelworC. Make friends with them, emerge in the depths. 2010 is bringing you more of those very sweet pits of modular destruction and despair. Order all the stuff you can get from them, their older materials were released on Celtic Circle Productions, the newer ones via Minuswelt Musikfabrik. All recommended. (And here's something older as well.)
2009, missing point #17: daybreakers
Daybreakers, a new vampire movie comes out next week. Bloodsuckers are the new tad and they're a bit overplayed by now after True Blood, New Moon and all their kin but then again I might just be jealous of the imminent success I didn't have a direct role in. But anyways. Daybreakers capitalizes on an old idea of David S. Goyer that didn't make it into Blade III: vampires walk the face of the Earth and humanity's the sorry-ass minority until the inevitable logistics hell breaks loose: blood farms can't really cope up with the population needs and they need to find a cure, fast. Not quite sure about how this ties into the otherwise evident problem of the energy/oil/resource crisis, but anyways. It has Willem Defoe with crossbows. You don't really need anything for the first week of the new, luckier 2010.
2009, missing post #16: fight evil with evil, the comics
Visualize a world without peace or justice. Visualize the business plot (1938) overthrowing FDR and installing a capito-fascist cabinet. Visualize the corporate wars (2050-2080) wiping the USA off the map with its own military-industrial complex. Visualize Entropica, a plot to murder God by three monotheist religions. Visualize two brothers, born from a medical cybernetic experiment on the effects of torture and human suffering. Visualize Man-Machine, destined to unleash a blind fury on the world. Visualize his brother, I-7the fourth prophet, spreadin a gospel of war among the machine-intelligence. THE MAN-MACHINE EPIC tells the story of their conflict... (via fightevilwithevil)
Not forgetting you either, rrooyyccee. Read his online cyberpunk comics at fightevilwithevil.com and enhance it with the related blog as well. It is actually quite good, lost in a triangle somewhere between Nawlz, moody French comics and Blame!.
2009, missing post #15: the lady gaga david lachapelle photo shoot
Part The Winter Market, part Metropolis.. and you know the rest. Lady Gaga's new photo shoot with David Lachapelle - grab the rest here on the updated mashkulture link, including Tesla punishment coils and - how to effectively and cartoonishly fall out of a wheelchair. (M1k3y believes I triggered some malware alert with the celebritysmackblog link.)
2009, missing post #11: day of darkness, etape two
This film covers a bit from the Caldari-Gallente war. It's set 200 years ago, before any of the 4 races had pod technology. I tried to use ships that may have been around back then, though sadly there's not a huge amount of information that I could find. (via youtube)