Tag: Technology
In an effort to better understand the science behind a relatively new form of musical expression, a team of researchers at the University of Southern California conducted an extensive MRI study of the various sounds produced by one 27-year-old beatboxer. The scientists made audio and x-ray video recordings of each sound in the man’s repertoire, […]
So you’re out shopping for clothes and you notice that one of the store’s facial recognition-equipped mannequins appears to be spying on you. The Stealth Wear hoodie you just bought will protect you against drones, but is powerless against these bots. What do you do? You pick up a pair of Japanese professor Isao Echizen’s “Privacy […]
When 4chan exposed flaws in certain TRENDnet security systems that allowed hackers to snoop on private camera feeds last year, the whole process felt too wonky to be exploited by your average IRL citizen–unless your neighbor was a /b/tard or redditor, he probably wouldn’t be spying on you. A year later, TRENDnet has issued a […]
By some unknown digital wizardry (Melodyne? An Echo Nest API?) a relatively anonymous digital artist has changed R.E.M.’s colossal “Losing My Religion” from dark and impressionistic to sunny and Smiths-y. The secret? Taking every minor note in the song and raising it by a half step (putting the song in its parallel major key, for […]
HTML5, the language that’s helped usher in the web’s current incarnation–with its infinite scrolling, emphasis on interactivity, and beautiful custom page layouts–is still a relatively new technology. It’s already spawned some classics (and might I humbly submit this for consideration?), but by and large, its full potential has yet to be seen. Designer and developer Jongmin […]
You might as well just throw your iPhone in the garbage now. Coming soon, there will be some kind of update to Siri, the helpful invisible woman that lives inside your iPhone. It’s been discovered that Apple posted a job description looking for a writer to help create more dialog for Siri and make her […]
Artist Adam Harvey–the guy behind this anti-facial-recognition makeup–is back ,with more practical, surveillance-busting work: Stealth Wear, a line of clothing designed to block thermal imaging, a tracking and surveillance technique often used by drones. According to the artist, Stealth Wear “continues to explore the aesthetics of privacy and the potential for fashion to challenge authoritarian surveillance.” […]
Ever feel like people don’t pay enough attention to you? Buy the Deaf Leopard, a CO2-powered horn that’s as loud as a passing train, according to the manufacturer’s site. For a cool $549, this glorious device can be yours, until the cops confiscate it from you. It’s a shame that Christmas has already passed, but if you […]
Number-crunching Austrian artist Peter Jellitsch was inspired by the internet to create the above sculpture, but not in the nostalgic/free associative/more-is-more way that’s typical of much net art–Jellitsch was simply interested in signal strength. For 45 days, the artist used a radio-wave-measuring device to read the strength of the Wi-Fi network at the Bleecker Street […]
Edmund Helmert, the creative mind behind BoxOfficeQuant, can be thought of as a kind of Nate Silver for the film industry–researching, plotting, and analyzing data about movies, with hopes to “report on the financial state of the industry and attempt to predict its future.” For his latest project, he used this beautiful circular histogram to […]
