The obliteration room 2011 revisits the popular interactive children’s project developed by Yayoi Kusama for the Queensland Art Gallery’s ‘APT 2002: Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’. In this reworked and enlarged installation, an Australian domestic environment is recreated in the gallery space, complete with locally sourced furniture and ornamentation, all of which has been painted completely white. While this may suggest an everyday topography drained of all colour and specificity, it also functions as a blank canvas to be invigorated — or, in Kusama’s vocabulary, ‘obliterated’ — through the application, to every available surface, of brightly coloured stickers in the shape of dots.

As with many of Kusama’s installations, the work is disarmingly simple in its elemental composition; however, it brilliantly exploits the framework of its presentation. The white room is gradually obliterated over the course of the exhibition, the space changing measurably with the passage of time as the dots accumulate as a result of thousands and thousands of collaborators.

Interactivity became an important component of Kusama’s work in the mid to late 1960s, when her solo public performances expanded into participatory happenings. A product of the postwar Avant-garde, which almost immediately crossed over into popular culture, or at least underground counter culture, happenings developed as unconventional performance events increasingly relying on audience reaction and direct participation. Kusama’s happenings, known as ‘body festivals’ — or ‘orgies’, as they were often sensationally reported in the mainstream press — typically provided platforms for spontaneous and improvisatory behaviour within conceptual and aesthetic frameworks determined by the artist. Often involving public nudity — the artist hoped to contrast the beauty of the youthful human body with the violence of the US–Vietnam War — they challenged prevailing moral frameworks.

Installation view of The obliteration room 2011 as part of ‘Yayoi Kusama: Look Now, See Forever’, Gallery of Modern Art, 2011 / © Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc. / Photograph: Mark Sherwood

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Awesome video.

Digi-Comp II is a classic 1960′s educational computer kit– an automatic binary digital mechanical computer, capable of conducting basic operations like adding, multiplying, subtracting, dividing, counting, and so forth. These operations are all conducted by the action of marbles rolling down a slope.

A huge calculator machine.

Be Your Own Souvenir, a project  by Barcelona based blablabLAB.

This past January, the installation connected passersby with the arts and technology, allowing people to become active collaborators with blablabLAB . Each visitor assumed the dual role of producer and consumer, with the help of customized software . The system invited each guest (acting  as a human statue) to be filmed in front of three kinect sensors for a full 360-degree scan. Real-time 3-D data was used to duplicate the best image of a subject, then code was applied to turn the data points into a volumetric 3-D model. Moments later, the RapMan 3.1 3D printer ejected a figurine-sized version of the participant. blablabLAB describes the project’s aim:

The project mimics the informal artistic context of this popular street, human sculptures and craftsmen, bringing diverse realities and enabling greater empathy between the agents that cohabit in the public space.

Via: PSFK

The Johnny Cash Project is a global collaborative art project constructing a music video for Cash’s final studio recording, “Ain’t No Grave,” from hundreds of user-submitted one-of-a-kind portraits of the iconic artist. The drawings are crowdsourced using an online tool, which randomly selects three frames for the contributor to choose from and draw.

You can algorithmically curate various versions of the video by toggling between different criteria by which to sort the individual frames — highest-rated, most recent, most intricate, realistic, abstract, and more.

This tribute to Johnny Cash was thought by Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin and represents Cash’s continued existence, even after his death, through his music and his fans.

The IOCOSE collective has been working in Italy and Europe since 2006. It organizes actions in order to subvert ideologies, practices and processes of identification and production of meanings. It uses pranks and hoaxes as tactical means, as joyful and sound tools.

Empathy Box is one of their projects, they explain in their website:

“As often as their skins are wholly burned, we shall give them in exchange other skins” (Koran 4:56)

“For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them” (Gospel of Matthew 18, 20)

“An empathy box it’s an extension of your body; it’s the way you touch other humans, it’s the way you stop being alone” (Philip K. Dick, ‘Do androids dream of electric sheep?’)

Empathy Box© is a machine enabling you to feel empathy.  It can be used by a group of persons to get an electric shock and share a strong and true feeling. The painful electric discharges are shared by the believers connected to each other and to the box. Everyone of them feels the same pain, thus everyone has the same experience.

Pain is the only common aspect of every religion. It is used for spreading any kind of dogma, it goes beyond the differences between the religious traditions and directly into the most intimate sphere of a human being.

Empathy Box© tries to appeal to new generations by providing a technological tool for introducing religious life in the daily habits. It can be used in a very short time, and its consumption can easily fit in a daily schedule. Aesthetically it looks like a stylish furniture, made of several materials like wood and steel, solid and comfortable at the same time. It creates a strong physical sensation. It has been created for those who feel that the contact with their own soul is vanishing, and need to find a way for spirituality. It is supposed to be used in a group to encourage the social sharing of religious practices.

If the hi-tech market needs consumers constantly worshipping their products, then there is no reason for religions not to do the same.

WHAIWHAI is  a different kind of travel guide, it creates an interactive and playful way to discover a city.

Players begin by sending a text message to WHAIWHAI, which can specify the number of hours they would like to play the game, the difficultly level, or the starting location. A series of enigmas are then sent to the player, each requiring local knowledge to solve before the next destination is revealed. As the adventure unfolds, the book provides the next installment of a narrative based on the city’s history.

Each guidebook can be played twice, with a different series of challenges and stories. Players also have the option of challenging their friends to a game, where they will be led on different adventures that start and finish at the same locations.

Bompas & Parr, is a London based studio which merges food, architecture and art, creating  amazing food experiences often working on an architectural scale with cutting edge technology.

Some of their projects includes:

The Ziggurat of Flavour

The Ziggurat of Flavour is a pyramidal installation containing a cloud of breathable fruit. For the first time ever visitors will be able to contribute to their five-a-day just by breathing.After negotiating the dense mist of vaporized fruit, visitors emerge onto a slide at the top of the structure. As they slide back down  their kinetic energy will be harnessed to make the cloud even denser.

The fruit cloud is formatted as a labyrinth you can taste. The fresh fruit is being prepared onsite, liquefied through Heath Robinesque machinery and clarified though reverse osmosis.

Taste becomes spatialised as a public realm, scaled up from bodily interior to building interior. In this way the fruit becomes architecture – an immersive, habitable environment.

The Ziggurat of Flavour draws inspiration from 18^th Century Cuccagna monuments. These formed the centerpieces for the most spectacular public celebrations in history.  They were vast architectural structures made of food based on the peasant tale of the Land of Cockaigne; a mythical place with mountains of cheese, rainstorms of cake and where all wildlife was pre-cooked and waiting to be eaten.

Architectural Punchbowl

Architectural Punchbowl is a project where the briefing was to  explode cocktails to the scale of buildings. As a result they flooded 33 Portland Place with over four tonnes of punch – enough for 25,000 people. The Punchbowl was so large that engineers Arup had to make sure the building wouldn’t collapse under the weight of alcohol. Visitors rafted across the punch before having a drink and toying with the remote control garnishes.

Alcoholic Architecture

The UK’s first walk-in cocktail

Alcoholic Architecture is a walk-in cloud of breathable cocktail. Visitors donned protective suits before entering into a mist of vaporised gin and tonic which they imbibed through inhaling.