Posts Tagged ‘maker’
“He’s a pinball wizard”*…
Mark Frauenfelder talks with Tanner Petch, the creator of play-able pieces of art: an arcade full of handmade pinball machines…
Sinkhole is a backwards game that borrows from the aesthetic of early pinball, particularly “wood rail” games from pre-1960s. The fact that it tilts away from you changes your experience a lot more than you’d expect and came from trying to question what were some of the very core aspects of pinball that could be tinkered with. In addition to the wooden components, the art style, playfield design, and overall theme were inspired by the esoteric nature of early games (at least compared to what we expect today)…
Prometheus was the first game I made and is based on the part of the myth where an eagle eats Prometheus’ liver every day after it regenerates. In the game, the player is the eagle, and the only objective is to hit four drop targets which represent four bites of the liver. You do this as many times as you want to, or until you lose. Rather than an individual score, the display shows the cumulative number of livers eaten as long as the machine has existed…
More at: “Check out Tanner Petch’s weird homebrew pinball machines” @tpetch via @Frauenfelder in @BoingBoing
* The Who, “Pinball Wizard,” Tommy
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As we finesse the flippers, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that Hewlett-Packard introduced the first handheld scientific calculator, the HP-35, a calculator with trigonometric and exponential functions. The model name was a reflection of the fact that the unit had 35 keys.
It became known as “the electronic slide rule”– a device that it (and its successors, from both HP and TI) effectively replaced.
“My name is Max. My world is fire.”*…
The inspiration for this project was the Doof Warrior’s flamethrower guitar from Mad Max. Nothing says rock-n-roll more than actual fire entwined with your tunes!
I didn’t want to try to replicate exactly what he had, and I also wanted to scale things down to be marginally safer. This version can be built from hardware store parts in a very short amount of time…
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From Caleb Kraft and the marvelous Make. TotH to Bored Panda.
* Max Rockatansky, Mad Max: Fury Road
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As we fire ’em up, we might send glamorous birthday greetings to Luciana Paluzzi; she was born on this date in 1937. An actress whose career began with an uncredited walk-on in Three Coins in the Fountain in 1954, she acted in dozens of films, mostly in Italy, until 1965, when she appeared in her best-known role, SPECTRE assassin Fiona Volpe in the fourth James Bond film, Thunderball. A victim of the “Bond Girl curse,” her best-known role afterwards was probably a tangential turn in Muscle Beach Party.
Luciana Paluzzi/Fiona Volpe
“Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all”*…
German artist Ralf Baecker gives technology a life of its own. His new piece Irrational Computing, which debuts June 10 at the International Triennial of New Media Art, use semiconductor crystals (quartz sand) and connects them to interlinked modules to create a primitive macroscopic signal processor. In other words, he’s using quartz (a natural resource that’s one of the basic commodities for all information technology), to create a raw mineral computer.
Baecker used quartz crystals taken directly from nature and industrial waste products and connected them to the modules, which use the electrical and mechanical specifics of the mineral to form a visual display, of sorts. Simultaneously, the crystals work as sound generators, as the electrical impulses from the modules force the quartz to vibrate. Through speakers, gallery visitors can both see and hear these quartz crystals. They even appear to have an unpredictable, life-like “conversation” with the other materials in the installation set-up, as the impulse signals and responses are organically random (thus, the “Irrational” part of the installation’s title)…
See more, and read an interview with Baecker, via The Creator’s Project (a JV of Intel and Vice), at “An Artist Has Made A Primitive Computer Out Of Earth Crystals, And Little Else.”
* John F. Kennedy
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As we muse on minerals, we might spare a thought for a key intellectual ancestor of Hacking and “Making”: the Father of the Age of Reason and author (in Candide) of the immortal– and sardonically ironic– advice that each of us should “tend his own garden,” Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire; he died on this date in 1778.
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