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Leonardo’s robot could stand, sit, raise its visor and independently maneuver its arms. The entire robotic system was operated by a series of pulleys and cables. Since the discovery of the sketchbook, the robot has been built faithfully based on Leonardo’s design; this proved it was fully functional, as Leonardo had planned.
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“He found this response of “it’s old” (and therefore it’s *good*) quite puzzling. And then got to thinking how as a digital, “new media” person folks would ask him about his work to which he would respond, “It’s digital. It’s *new*.” And by the same token, implicitly, it’s *good.* He realized that neither “new” nor “old” are sufficient rationales to express quality. That the quality of “good” is something more.”
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“In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness… By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and bodily heat-controls - all such extensions of our bodies, including cities - will be translated into information systems.”
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Mark Weiser and his team using prototype tabs, pads and a board at Xerox PARC in 1990/91.
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The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America’s most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life – from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age – has been less widely understood.
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The Frankenfont project, by Ben Fry (Fathom), reconstructs Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein using parts of incomplete fonts found in PDFs from the internet.
“An edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein laid out using characters and glyphs from PDF documents obtained through internet searches. The incomplete fonts found in the PDFs were reassembled into the text of Frankenstein based on their frequency of use. The most common characters are employed at the beginning of the book, and the text devolves into less common, more grotesque shapes and forms toward the end.”
(Source: brianlucid)
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Project Neon by Kirsten Hively is a project to document the best of New York’s neon signs before they’re replaced with LED screens. She is taking photographs of the signs, plotting them on a Google Map and updating a blog regularly with stories about the places she goes and the people running the businesses that still use them.
Kirsten is also crowdsourcing the money to build an iPhone app that will allow people to get out and explore the city’s neon themselves.
You can read more on the Project Neon blog.
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Bob Spence and Mark Apperley explain their invention of the Bifocal Display.
