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In conjunction with Creative Time, Playing the Building is a project by David Byrne in which he turns a 9,000 sq. ft abandoned room in the Battery Maritime Building into an instrument. Through the use of an antique pump organ, controlled devices create sounds with only what is afforded by the building's infrastructure, including heating pipes, metal beams and pillars.

Yesterday, Microsoft finally released the first public version of Photosynth, software that meshes many photos of the same place into a 3D landscape. There are already several synths on the Photosynth website - to view them you'll first need to download the software there. You can upload collections of your own photos of a place and have them get the Photosynth treatment. The video below gives you an idea of what you can expect.Impressive though this week's public release is, there's a lot to look forward to in the future.

The video below shows a scenario that is likely to become real as industrial robots improve: a human and a robot work together to assemble an object from its parts. But in the clip from the University of Minho, Portugal, not everything is going to plan. The human gets a stern warning from the robot that they are doing it wrong.The pair are assembling a foam chassis with two wheels. Although the robot has already attached the wheel on its side of the chassis, the human offers it another. The robot - ARoS - is not impressed."Ah!

by Perrin Drumm
Last month, Santa Monica's pier hosted 12 hours of performance and installation art, attracting 200,000 revelers for Glow, a public light and sound extravaganza in the style of Paris' Nuit Blanche. This video navigates through both the throngs of people (almost more notable than the art itself) and the many luminous installations dotting the beach and boardwalk.

Tucked in an anonymous building on a quiet Berkeley, CA street, June Taylor makes small batches of some of the most mouth-watering jams, preserves, syrups and marmalades we've tasted. In this video, June modestly shares her artisan and old-world techniques, explaining how nature helps dictate exotic flavor combinations like Strawberry and Provençal Lavender and how she takes into consideration even the tiniest of details, such as the shape and size of the pieces of fruit. It's a window into an exceedingly rare level of art and craft.

Bart Remes and his team at the Technical University of Delft have just produced the smallest-ever flapping wing robot (ornithopter) with a built-in camera.With a wingspan of just 10 centimetres, the DelFly could easily be confused with a real dragonfly. There's a video of it in action below. The small box in the bottom righthand corner gives a DelFly's eye view of the world.The DelFly should help the researchers understand more about the aerodynamics associated with ornithopter flight, but its onboard camera suggests it could have immediate practical uses too. A swarm of the cheap fliers could quickly bring back footage from a wide area after, say, an earthquake.But taking the DelFly out of the lab and into the real world might generate its own problems. As one commentator on YouTube has already pointed out: "it would probably get blown away".

In this video RISD president John Maeda narrates a visit to Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, CT. Maeda shares his impressions and talks about how it relates to his thoughts on simplicity. Meanwhile, we explore the the site (there are actually several buildings on the property in addition to the Glass House), shot over a couple picture perfect spring days.

Blame Earl Butz. That is how we started our post on Peak Corn, noting that Richard Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture told farmers to "get big or get out," and to plant crops like corn "from fence row to fence row." Almost forty years later, Director Aaron Woolf interviews an unrepentant Butz (just prior to his death), but unlike a Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock, does it with grace, dignity and humor.

That's what separates King Corn (now out on DVD, previously covered by Jasmin for its theatrical ...

Bringing together 24 street artists from all over the world, Electric Windows is a semi-permanent installation of large-scale work exhibited on the exterior windows of a 19th century blanket factory in Beacon, NY. We traveled to the small town earlier this year to meet some of the artists and watch them make "urban art" in a not-so-urban setting. We also interview one of the organizers, Daniel Weise, a vet of the NYC street artist scene who recently moved to Beacon and co-founded Beacon's Open Space gallery there.

This new jet plane has just taken its first test flight - but the pilot need not rely on his personal parachute in the event of a problem. The small plane packs one big enough to let the whole craft drift to earth.You can see the new plane take off in this video - it sports an usual split tailplane design.

A massage-based video game controller, panties with wings and an inflatable dress were just a few of the concepts exhibited recently at the NYC gallery Eyebeam to launch Sabine Seymour's new book "Fashionable Technology." In this video, we interview Sabine about the burgeoning field and her lifelong obsession with fashion. She also helps us peruse the exhibit, chatting with the designers and artists behind each piece to learn about their inspiration and process.To see all the projects, buy the book from
Amazon.

E-book readers like the Kindle may be getting better, but still fall short of the usability of paper books. You can't turn or flip through pages, or compare different documents as you would with paper. A new prototype with two displays can do all that - as the video below shows.The two leaves can be opened and closed to simulate turning pages, or even separated to pass round or compare documents. When the two leaves are folded back, the device shows one display on each side.

The video below shows some new software in action that hides the identity of people in CCTV footage. The idea is that it protects the identity of anyone innocent that is caught on the tape. US firm 3VR say that only if somebody was acting suspiciously would someone with security clearance unscramble the faces of a person shownIn 2006, we wrote about a similar system developed by a Swiss company, Emitall. Their own video shows it at work blurring out people and cars.The technology has been likened to the scramble suits worn by narcotics officers in Philip K Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly.

Most of us know that tornadoes are unpredictable, uncontrollable, and dangerous. But a Canadian engineer thinks they could be the future of electricity generation. He wants to make electricity from artificial tornadoes.Louis Michaud, a retired petroleum engineer in Sarnia, Ontario, plans to use the waste heat from conventional power plants to create an "atmospheric vortex engine" - a small, controlled tornado that would drive turbines and generate electricity. "I'm confident that we could control these things," he says. Michaud also thinks solar powered tornados generated using the sun's heat could also work.His latest design is a circular wall 200 meters across and 100 meters high without a roof.

We've been fans of Eltono's for a long time. We love his latest exhibition in which he brings interactivity into a local gallery in Lima, Peru.