July 25, 2011
Dick Termes is an innovative American artist who uses a six point perspective system that he devised to create unique paintings on large spheres called Termespheres. They are paintings on spherical canvases that capture an entire environment (Up, Down, Left, Right, Front & Back). Termespheres are typically hung by small chains and rotated with electric ceiling motors to reveal a complete world as the spheres slowly rotate. Optical illusions tend to appear as the spheres rotate.
Although the image is painted on the outside of the convex sphere, the vantage point continuously changes. The rotation also may appear to reverse direction, giving the sensation that the viewer is inside the painting viewing the concave surface of the inside of the rotating sphere. Although the six point perspective appears very non-linear and distorted when viewed on a two-dimensional plane, when the design is superimposed on the sphere, the perspective appears corrected. Termes acknowledges strong influences from M.C. Escher and Buckminster Fuller in developing his technique.
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July 25, 2011
Wave Twisters (2001) is an animated film, also known as the first turntablism-based musical. It is based on DJ Q-Bert’s album of the same name. The film is entirely scripted to match the DJ Q-Bert recording. As such, it can seem a little disjointed at times. It was produced digitally using Adobe After Effects and a relatively small team of animators. Buckethead makes a short appearance in the film as well, near the beginning.
A crew of heroes is determined to save the lost arts of Hip Hop. Break Dancing, Graffiti, MCing, and DJing from total extinction. The lost arts are being oppressed throughout inner-space by lord Ook and his evil minions the Chinheads. The dental commander Dr. Julio Azul DDS, assumed to be secretary Honey Drips, Dental Hygienist/Robot Rubbish, and Grandpa have a series of adventures, synced to the music. Armed with the ancient relic known as the Wave Twister (a small turntable/wristwatch, the only weapon powerful enough to defeat their enemies), they travel to the far ends of inner-space for a final confrontation with the sinister army of oppressors. The film ends with the team teaching the liberated the lost fundamentals of hip hop.
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July 25, 2011
Idiocracy is a 2006 American film, a satirical science fiction comedy, directed by Mike Judge. The film tells the story of two ordinary people who are taken into a top-secret military hibernation experiment which goes awry, and awaken 500 years in the future. They discover that the world has degenerated into a dystopia where advertising, commercialism, and cultural anti-intellectualism run rampant and dysgenic pressure has resulted in a uniformly stupid human society devoid of intellectual curiosity, social responsibility and coherent notions of justice and human rights. Rather, this future society emphasizes popularity, sexual attraction, and hedonism.
During the prologue, a narrator explains that in our modern society, natural selection does not favor the intelligent (who are very selective and careful in how they have children) and that less-intelligent people procreate freely and easily out-breed the intelligent. This, combined with a general celebration of the cultural ‘lowest common denominator’ and general anti-intellectual cultural mores result in a world that has degenerated into a barely functioning society held together by a rapidly crumbling, mostly automated technological infrastructure that was created by intelligent individuals many years (perhaps centuries) earlier that few, if any, of the members of 26th Century society know how to operate or fix.
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July 25, 2011
Luigi Colani (b. 1928) is a German industrial designer. The prime characteristic of his designs are the rounded, organic forms, which he terms ‘biodynamic’ and claims are ergonomically superior to traditional designs. His ‘kitchen satellite’ from 1969 is the most prominent example of this school of thought. Many of his designs for small appliances are being mass-produced and marketed, but his larger designs have not been built, ‘a whole host of futuristic concepts that will have us living in pods and driving cars so flat that leg amputation is the only option.’
Colani responding to his critics said, ‘The earth is round, all the heavenly bodies are round; they all move on round or elliptical orbits. This same image of circular globe-shaped mini worlds orbiting around each other follows us right down to the microcosmos. We are even aroused by round forms in species propagation related eroticism. Why should I join the straying mass who want to make everything angular? I am going to pursue Galileo Galilei’s philosophy: my world is also round.’
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July 25, 2011
A nixie tube, or cold cathode display, is an electronic device for displaying numerals or other information using glow discharge. The glass tube contains a wire-mesh anode and multiple cathodes, shaped like numerals or other symbols. Applying power to one cathode surrounds it with an orange glow discharge. The tube is filled with a gas at low pressure, usually mostly neon and often a little mercury or argon.
Although it resembles a vacuum tube in appearance, its operation does not depend on thermionic emission of electrons from a heated cathode. It is therefore called a cold-cathode tube (a form of gas-filled tube), or a variant of neon lamp. Such tubes rarely exceed 40 °C (104 °F) even under the most severe of operating conditions in a room at ambient temperature. Vacuum fluorescent displays from the same era use completely different technology – they have a heated cathode together with a control grid and shaped phosphor anodes; Nixies have no heater or control grid, typically a single anode, and shaped bare metal cathodes.
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July 25, 2011
Airstream is a brand of luxury recreational vehicle manufactured in Jackson Center, Ohio. It is currently a division of Thor Industries. The company, which now employs fewer than 400, is the oldest in the industry. Airstream trailers are easily recognized for their distinctive rounded aluminum bodies, which originated in the 1930s from designs created by Hawley Bowlus. Bowlus was the chief designer of Charles Lindbergh’s aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis.
The company was founded by Wally Byam, who began building trailers out of Masonite in his backyard in Los Angeles during the late 1920s. A lawyer by training, Byam published a magazine selling ‘how-to’ kits to customers wishing to build their own trailers. He then acquired the struggling Bowlus Company. In 1936 Byam introduced the ‘Airstream Clipper,’ which was essentially a rebadged 1935 Bowlus, with the door relocated from the front to the side. The design cut down on wind resistance and thus improved fuel efficiency. It was the first of the now familiar sausage-shaped, silver aluminum Airstream trailers.
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