“Oldest” computer music unveiled
| Recorded in Manchester, 1951.
Category: {technology}
Technology
Glass engines and marble machines
Remarkable steam-powered engines by glass artist Bandhu Scott Dunham. The one above is based on 19th century designs. Others are Dunham’s own developments which include contraptions to move glass marbles up and down a series of corkscrew paths. Still pictures don’t do these things justice, best to look at two short QT movies here and here which show the machines in operation.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Wesley Fleming’s glass insects
• The art of Lucio Bubacco
• The glass menagerie
The art of Thomas Briggs
Blog this: tits out for the future
left: tits t-shirt by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren.
right: the Hipp Chronoscope via io9.
A new year brings new blogs which is perhaps just as well seeing as the old year drew a line under some regular reads.
The Look, “Adventures in pop and rock fashion”, began posting a couple of weeks ago, spinning off from Paul Gorman’s book of the same name. Pieces there which immediately catch my eye are a skate through Billy Bowers’ outrageous clothing designs and a nice potted-history of the “tits tee”. I’d not realised before that the history of this latter creation goes back beyond punk to the early Seventies, another example of the evolution from post-psychedelic freakery to punk being a process of gradual elision, not the clean break that lazy commentary often suggests.
Also arriving (and noted everywhere by now) is io9, a new addition to the Gawker network, which looks at sf-related culture. I’ve already had a traffic spike from there after they linked to my Hugh Ferriss post and it’s good to see that Bldg Blog‘s Geoff Manaugh is among their contributors.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ave Atque Vale!
Gold robots
Even cigarette lighters aren’t immune from the Japanese desire to robotise the world, one object at a time. These are real gold versions of the Lightan, robot characters from an Eighties anime series, Golden Warrior Gold Lightan, and are currently on display at The Great Robot Exhibition in the National Museum of Nature and Science, Ueno, Tokyo until January 27th, 2008. The always reliable PingMag has a good exhibition report which is fortunate since the official site is Japanese-only.
Among the antique automata in the exhibition there’s this rather splendid clockwork crab. It would have been nice to know something about this but the only information is a Japanese caption. What was it for? Were many of these made or was it unique, like the Bowes Swan?
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Almacan
• The sculpture of Christopher Conte
• The Bowes Swan