Computer Vision Dazzle Makeup by Adam Harvey
Adam Harvey is currently writing his thesis at the ITP and his topic is Computer Vision Dazzle. He’s researching and developing privacy enhancing counter technology, to protect individual privacy for everyone. So here you can find some makeup patterns which make it impossible for the OpenCV library and it’s Haar cascade files, to detect a face. Fun times ahead!
About this image:
Images with a red square tested positive, a face was found
Images without a red square tested negative, no face was found
Images under the section “TEST PATTERNS” are made according to results of the Haar deconstruction
Images under “RANDOM PATTERNS” are random doodles made without the anti-face detection patterns in mind
Images underneath the “NO PATTERNS” heading are left untouched to show that the face detection works well on simple line drawings
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eVolo Announces Winners of 2010 Skyscraper Competition
The winners of eVolo’s 2010 Skyscraper Competition were announced today. After several years of organizing, this annual competition has become a renowned architectural prize around the world. The main idea of the contest is to examine the relationship between the skyscraper and the natural world, the skyscraper and the community, and the skyscraper and urban living. The competition asked to push our imagination to redefine the term skyscraper through the use of new materials, technology, aesthetics, programs, and spatial organizations. Globalization, environmental warming, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution are just some of the multi-layered elements that were in the focal point.
First Place: Vertical Prison by Chow Khoon Toong, Ong Tien Yee, Beh Ssi Cze, Malaysia (project info)
Second Place: Water Purification Skyscraper in Jakarta by Rezza Rahdian, Erwin Setiawan, Ayu Diah Shanti, Leonardus Chrisnantyo, Indonesia (project info)
Third Place: Nested Skyscraper in Tokyo by Ryohei Koike, Jarod Poenisch, United States (project info)
For Special Mentions click here.
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via Bustler
Sketch-a-Move by Anab Jain and Louise Klinker
Sketch-a-Move is a project by Anab Jain and Louise Klinker. They actually did this a few years ago. It’s a concept for a toy car that allows you to explore the unique relationships between small surface doodles and actual physical movements. If you draw a circle on the top of the toy car, it will move in a circle. If you draw a complicated spiral, the car will move in a spiral. They don’t explain how it actually works or could work, but it sure looks like fun.
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MAP Manual of Architectural Possibilities) 002 QUARANTINE by David Garcia Studio
RADDblog previously reported on MAP 001 ANTARCTICA by David Garcia Studio, and they are now releasing the second installment: MAP 002 QUARANTINE.
from the designers:
DAVID GARCIA STUDIO is proud to be exhibiting at the prestigious STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE in New York, at the “LANDSCAPES OF QUARANTINE” exhibition, curated by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley. The Studio will be exhibiting and launching the second issue of MAP (Manual of Architectural Possibilities). MAP 001 focused on Antarctica, and with MAP 002 QUARANTINE will be investigating and questioning the subject through research and projects, and the realm of architectural ideas. Four projects are treated on this issue: A Domestic Isolation Unit, an Instantly Quarantinable Farm, a Zoo of Infectious Species, and a Quarantined Library on a cargo ship. Along with the projects, our fact page will focus on a series of topics regarding quarantine, from the biological to the political, the geographical and beyond. We are happy to have Peter Cook along again, writing the introduction. Each number of MAP 002 is individually numbered from 1 to 2000.
The opening will take place Tuesday evening, March 9th at 7 pm, where MAP will be on sale.
“LANDSCAPES OF QUARANTINE”
9th March – 17th April, 2010
STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE
97 Kenmare Street New York, NY 10012
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Flyfire by SENSEable City Laboratory / MIT
Flyfire is project initiated by the SENSEable City Laboratory in collaboration with ARES Lab (Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory), both departments of the MIT. The goal is to transform any ordinary space into a highly immersive and interactive display environment. Its first implemetation is a display system using a large number of self-organizing micro helicopters. Each of them acts as smart pixel by using LED’s. Their position in 3D space and their color can be defined in real time.
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GLOBAL TACOSHED / Do You Know Where Your Taco Comes From?
(please click on image above for slight larger version)
Like a culinary version of Sourcemap, Rebar has teamed up with landscape architectDavid Fletcher and some students from the increasingly interesting California College of the Arts in San Francisco to explore the ingredients of your local taco—from pinto beans to the aluminum foil it all comes wrapped in.
- Our premise was that a seemingly simple, familiar food like the taco truck taco could provide visceral insight into the connections between the systems we were exploring [in our studio's investigation of the city]. By thoroughly learning the process of formation and lifecycle for what it takes to make a taco, we would be better able to propose and design a speculative model of a holistic and sustainable urban future. What resulted was a richly complex network of systems, flows and ecologies that we call the global Tacoshed.
This is a participatory undertaking; meet at the Studio for Urban Projects in San Francisco at 7pm on Thursday, February 25, to find out how you, too, can map a taco. Here’s a map.
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via BLDGBLOG
DIY 3-Axis CNC by Nick Santillan
from the designer:
Always wanting to experiment with CNC technology and knowing that having parts made from them can get expensive fast, I thought owning a CNC would allow me to really experiment that would be otherwise impossible to do with outsource CNC jobs. I soon discovered some plans on how to build your own CNC. After extensive research I bought a DIY plan and started building my CNC only to discover 90% of the way that the plan and design was not up to my expectations. The experience did give me enough knowledge on how CNC works which I found invaluable. From there I scrapped the first build, researched some more, bought better suited parts (bearings, slides, etc) and built this CNC using my own design and improvements.
This CNC is designed to be quickly assembled and disassembled into three main parts for ease of transportation and reduced storage. I used a moving gantry with an open table design to have the option for the CNC to directly mill or engrave the surface below. For example, if I wanted to carve a tabletop or a wall I can bolt the CNC directly to the surface and engrave it directly. This would have been otherwise impossible to do with other CNC machines. It also has a removable tool holder to allow customized mounts for almost any tool needed. Currently only a plunge router is used, but the design allows a laser cutter or anything else to be quickly attached to it for future upgrades. Some of my projects fabrication has been assisted using this CNC.
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via Nick Santillan
The Gentrification of Brooklyn by Specter
Interesting hand painted billboards made by Specter for “The Gentrification of Brooklyn” exhibition. Some are great, and some are a bit over the top.
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A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter by Caleb Larsen
A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter by Caleb Larsen is a physical sculpture that is perptually attempting to auction itself on eBay. Here is the auction, the current bid is $4,250.
Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.
If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.
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BLOODLINE: THE SELF-CONSUMING BARBECUE PAVILION by Caroline O’Donnell
from BLDGBLOG:
In a fantastic hybrid of edible architecture and temporary summer pavilion, architect Caroline O’Donnell has proposed Bloodline, a free-standing, self-consuming grilling shelter.
Bloodline is the outcome of O’Donnell’s 2007 fellowship and residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude, a grant-making and residency institution housed in the late-Baroque “Solitude Castle” near Stuttgart in southern Germany.
Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemburg, built Schloss Solitude in 1763 as a private pleasure house—a cross between a party castle, summer retreat, and hunting lodge. Solitude was intended to be more intimate and less formal than his royal palace at Ludwigsburg, like the Trianons were to Versailles.
Among the prerequisites for an eighteenth-century aristocrat to achieve relaxation were a natural setting and, perhaps more importantly, minimal interaction with the servant classes. However, since domestic service was still required (aristocratic relaxation did not encompass preparing, serving, and cleaning up after meals, for example), palace architects had to resort to an extremely elaborate set of spatial tricks and distortions to make the servers as invisible as possible. The original design for the Petit Trianon even included a mechanism for raising and lowering the dining table through the floor so that it could be set and cleared out of sight.
According to O’Donnell, “The guides at Schloss Solitude could not understand why I wanted to see the service spaces, and tried to convince me that they were not interesting. I kept telling them in bad German that I was an architect and therefore interested in uninteresting spaces, but that seemed to cause more confusion.”
What she found, eventually, were a series of awkward and cramped service cupboards and passages, filling in the spaces around the formal, symmetrical rooms. They are the negative space of pure classical order; the banished evidence of domestic effort and bodily needs.
Interestingly, O’Donnell noticed that at Karl Eugen’s main palace, Ludwigsburg Castle, the formal rooms are arranged around the edge, concealing a rabbit warren of service spaces in the interior.
Meanwhile at Solitude, the reverse is true: the cupboards, closets, and service passages are banished to the edge, with the result that seven of the fourteen windows on the perfectly symmetrical south façade actually open onto these deformed, hidden spaces.
Among the domestic functions concealed in this way was fire maintenance: tiny fire-spaces were used for storing firewood and also enabled servants to stoke open fires while remaining behind the scenes.
O’Donnell explained that when she finally gained access to a fire-space, she noticed “the effects of this small-scale and contorted space on the body,” but she was most fascinated “by this idea of the fire-space as a window, through which the stooping servant had a rare window into the lives of his masters”—and, in some ways, a more complete or privileged understanding of the space of the palace as a whole.
So, back to the barbecue pavilion: O’Donnell’s Bloodline proposal would use 360 bags of grillholz (German barbecue wood sticks) as the cladding—enough for a summer season, or ninety barbecues at four bags per cook-out. As July fades into August, and then into September, the pavilion will gradually be dismantled: the architecture’s fiery function will lead it to literally consume itself from the outside in. This is an incredibly poetic literalization of the shelter’s function: architecture parlante at its finest.
The pavilion also plays on O’Donnell’s initial fascination with Solitude’s squished fire-spaces. Bloodline begins the summer as a perfect, platonic cube, but gradually grills itself down to an awkwardly shaped frame that mirrors a section through the original fire-space. In other words, through use, the mini-barbecue palace will reveal its contorted, service-space origins—a slow, season-long process of revelation.
Like Solitude’s original fire-spaces, which servants had to bend down and crawl to enter, the Bloodline barbecue pavilion is only designed to fit one person. And, as in the originals, that one person—the servant or barbecuer-in-chief, depending on how you look at these things—has a unique, more omniscient view.
Ludwigsburg and Solitude castles are linked by Solitudeallee, each palace is also aligned on its own axis of symmetry. When O’Donnell looked at these lines in satellite view, it became clear that there was a third axis, emerging from the forest, which was missing a castle.
Ingeniously, O’Donnell’s proposed site for Bloodline means that our barbecuing hero, standing in front of the grill-window on the southwest-facing side of the pavilion, is theonly person in their party who can see that they are actually inside the missing third castle.
In other words, while their friends and family relax in the grounds outside the pavilion, eating sausages they haven’t had to prepare, “only the servant (or grill-master) will know the truth,” explains O’Donnell, “although they can sneak others in, to share the secret.”
In terms of grilling experience, the barbecue pavilion that becomes a secret, personal castle seems second to none. “After that, the sausages are not my responsibility,” O’Donnell told me. “There are however custom spaces built into the pavilion on the west side for a fire-extinguisher and a fire-blanket, as well as a big vent on the east side that aligns with the prevailing wind and uses the stack-effect to ventilate the space naturally.”
A couple of thoughts immediately come to mind here: firstly, that this is the perfectFather’s Day gift. After all, doesn’t every red-blooded male secretly crave his own barbecue castle: a private space of solitude, unspoken power, and burger perfection?Lowe’s or Homebase could even stock build-your-own kits, for an extra DIY frisson.
I’m also reminded, via a link that was (coincidentally?) sent to me separately by Caroline O’Donnell, of Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham‘s theory that cooking is the root cause of human civilization. His basic idea is that the discovery of cooking allowed us to unlock many more calories in food, which gave us more energy for less effort, which in turn resulted in a massive increase in brain size in Homo sapiens (as compared to our primate ancestors).
That expanded brain of course led, eventually, to the flowering of the Baroque, in which rococo pleasure palaces were cleverly designed to hide any evidence of cooking facilities. O’Donnell’s pavilion gives cooking its due once again, as over the course of the summer Solitude’s missing third palace is revealed to be a a functional fire-space, rather than the abstracted perfection of a symmetrical cube. Barbecuing German day-trippers will thus be paying inadvertent homage to the role of fire in human civilization.
Caroline O’Donnell is working with Akademie Schloss Solitude to secure funding for the pavilion: the hope is to install it during the summer of 2011.
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via BLDGBLOG and Caroline O’Donnell
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