kristen's blog

While at the Milwaukee Art Museum last weekend, I came across this incredible piece in their Sensory Overload exhibition. Regularly spaced fiber optic cable hung from the ceiling of a dark room, creating an feeling of infinite space as you walked between the cables.  My friend Bryan took this great video. 

Edith Ackermann from the MIT Media Lab just sent along a website of the work of Arvind Gupta, which includes a fantastic page called Toys from Trash ("the best thing a child can do with a toy is break it !").

What a lovely collection of toys, ideas, and creativity... and really nice, simple documentation.

Another wonderful quote he references:

Asia and I have been experimenting with photograms using glow-in-the-dark paper. While looking for inspiration, I found this nice collection of photograms. The site also has a good history of the process.

I went to the No Coast craft fair tonight and one of the coolest things I saw were shadow puppets for sale. I took a flier and visited the Owly Shadow Puppets website and found out they are made using a laser cutter.  What a great application for a laser cutter!
Here is an image of the Toothfairy Landscape with Yeti, off of her Etsy store page.

Tyco Electronics (due Dec 15, March 15, etc.)

• Great Lakes on Wikipedia: Geology, Commerce, Ecology, and Shipwrecks
• EPA's Invasive Species Page
  

In September, I got to take a workshop with Swedish artist Per Helldorff. Per taught us how to make automata, similar to the one here (we made just one of the two happy audience members you see in the movie), using a combination of woodcarving and carpentry techniques:

Peter K (LTC instructor) told me about this cool/scary tool that lets you infiltrate a person's picture with an image that gets projected onto the thing they're taking a picture of:
Image Fulgurator

A survey about video game playing, conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project (and supported by the MacArthur Foundation, found that game playing is "universal" and "diverse" among American teens, and has the potential for civic engagement. The results are here.

This list of questions has come up in conversation around LTC a bit lately, and I thought you all might find it useful and interesting as well.

I don't know the full story with the project that Eleanor Duckworth was doing when she made this (she's at Harvard, in the School of Ed), but it's from something called "The African Primary Science Program: an Evaluation and Extended Thoughts".