Shimmering Glitters

A new Pew Internet study divides users of communication technology into 10 groups ranging from "Digital Collaborators" and "Media Movers" to "Tech Indifferent" and "Off the Network."Read it on your phone!

I don't have any really insightful commentary to put here, I'm just too excited about this being acknowledged as a trend:

Art Installations Find Fertile Ground in Science Centers."
"At the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, Bruce Shapiro has been an artist in residence. He specializes in “motion control” installations whose aim, he said, is to pique curiosity and inspire a sense of wonder.

These are photos of Janet and Asia working with wind generators and leds. The photos need annotation ;-)

Here is a nice overview of the various conductive threads available from Fashioning Technology.

Keith, notice that the first thread they mention changes its resistance in correlation to its tension. Maybe "Musical Sponges" could become "Musical Threads"?

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. 

The Creativity and Collaboration Retreat (C2) will be hosted in Monterey, CA this summer, is anyone planning on attending? It looks amazing.

Let me list thy ways:

1) Monterey, CA as in Monterey-Bay-Aquarium Monterey.

2) The conference comes exactly after, and in relative proximity, to the Maker Faire

3) Conference presenters & organizers include Mike Petrich and Karen Wilkinson from the Exploratorium and Nina Simon, from the internet and Museum 2.0.

4) This is a very cool conference, for real:
"The experiential activities are informal opportunities to recharge in a collaborative, creative environment. There will be partner yoga. There will be cooking. There will be jam sessions. There will be driftwood sculpturing on the beach. If you would like to help lead one of these activities or suggest one of your own, please go here to share your brilliance. We can’t provide materials, but we can provide willing participants."

5) I already have my plane ticket for the Maker Faire, but I built in some time for play and, apparently, an unforeseen conference!

I'm really looking forward to the Art and Code conference next month at Carnegie Mellon; it'll be my first time back in 5 years.

The conference is focused on highlighting accessible programming environments (especially open-source) that allow for artistic expression, including Alice, Hackety Hack, Max/MSP/Jitter, openFrameworks, Processing, Scratch, Silverlight, and vvvv

The slate of presenters makes me want to bring a marker for autographs.

The Greener Gadgets Competition: a design competition aimed at generating outstanding design innovations for greener electronics... One interesting submission is this printer that uses coffee grounds to produce ink... 

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: