Johnnymotion and I had a great night out last night with Team Maxon at Rock ‘n Bowl (Bowling Nawlins style with live rockabilly music). What nice folks! Up early again today for another 8:30 am session, this time a class on:

How to create your own 3D Scanner. It was fantastic!  For my students who may not know; 3D scanners analyze objects in real space so that the data collected can be used to re-create them in 3D software. The Digital Michelangelo project is a great example of this. Douglas Lanman and Gabriel Taubin from Brown University gave a course in how to use the software they’ve developed to make the multiple computations which allow you to creat your own 3D scanner with a media projector, webcam, foam core, a tape measure, a bright light, and a stick. amazing!

Then another Birds of a Feather session, this one focusing on 3D printing for Art and Visualization: industrial prototyping for scientific, medical, and engineering visualization.

There were about 4 artists, a lot of people from the medical community and several people working with Shapeways.com, Yumetech.com, zcorp.com. 3D printing is used to display medical models that aide in problem solveing, by Disney Imagineers, by Nike to create new show sole designs, for production and assembly (like cell phone parts that need to fit together), and for the movie Coreline, where 5,000 faces, each with different expressions were printed out.  Most 3D printing units are still very expensive but there is one, the Candyfab 4000,(about $500) that prints using sugar instead of expensive resins.

Then I went upstairs to play with the 3D printers in the Siggraph Studio but there was a line of people waiting to have their tiny models be born out of resin. This is where I first met the Gigipan and MaryJo from Carnegie Mellon Labs. (More on that later.)

The second and third floors of our enormous convention center also held galleries; BioLogic: A Natural History of Digital Life was a juried art gallery exhibition exploring the flux of natural and technological forces.

Artifacts from a Parallel Universe: Tentative Architecture of Other Earth_Coastline Inhabitants
Xárene Eskandar
Artifacts from a Parallel Universe is a garment that “breathes”. It is a chunky knit sweater with tubular protrusions that look like coral. Using sensors and shape-memory alloys embedded in the wool, the sweater tubes open or close to retain heat or to vent, based on the wearer’s temperature.
Biological Instrumentation
Nina Tommasi
This is an installation of mimosa plants, which close when touched. They are connected to an air compressor and other electronic equipment. Tiny speakers near them give off sounds as if they were coming from the plants themselves. When timed blasts of air are released, the plants contract.  As one wanders betweent eh planters it is easy to imagine that the plants are whispering to you, drawing you in, until the compressors discharge, startling people and plants alike.
Face Shift
Arthur Elsenaar,
Arthur describes his Facial-Hacking as post-neural exploration of facial display, a choreography, if you will. Electric Eigen-Portraits and Face Shift are original performances of algorithmic facial choreography exhibited as two video works.He believes the human face is under-utilized by the neural brain.
Growth Rendering Device
David Bowen
Growth Rendering Device is a “System [that] provides light and food in the form of a hydroponic solution for the plant. The plant reacts by growing. The device in -turn reacts to the plant by providing an inkjet drawing of the plant every twenty-four hours, After a new drawing is produced the system scrolls the roll of paper so a new drawing can be produced during the next cycle.” 
Hylozoic Soil
Philip Beesley,
Hylozoic Soil is a visually striking and multifaceted installation. Made up of a network of micro-controllers, proximity sensors, and shape-memory alloy actuators, this interactive environment draws the viewer into its startlingly aware environment. The viewer is at once drawn in by and then repelled by the changing mood of this electronic flora.

One
Yoon Chung Han,Gautam Rangan, Erick Oh, Mubbasir Kapadia.  One is an interactive piece consisting of a single drop of ink in a suspended Petri dish and a large projection of the same drop. Viewer interaction with the suspended dish is the means of evolution for the animated ink blot. The interactivity works with micropone, Piezo, and photo-sensors, but it is the immediate reaction of the sprites, and the animation that brings this piece to life.

TRANSDUCERS
Verena Friedrich,
TRANSDUCERS is an installation composed of several glass tubes, each encasing a single human hair collected from different individuals. Triggered by the machinery, the human hair is stimulated to react, and the reaction is transduced into an audible output. Every audible result provides a technological interpretation of identity.