openMaterials

The Resistor JelTone is an edible toy piano created by NYC Resistor members Ranjit Bhatnagar, Astrida Valigorsky, Mimi Hui and myself for the Jello Mold Competition. As part of our experiments we realized that jello and fruit, which contain a lot of water, are conductive. Embedded in each jello/fruit key is a sterling silver pin (food [...]

Jie Qi, from MIT’s High-Low Tech group, posted a couple really nice tutorials on how to combine paper, electronics and smart materials to create beautiful objects. The LED dragon kite: http://hlt.media.mit.edu/?p=1414 SMA origami crane: http://hlt.media.mit.edu/?p=1448

The first edition of Botacon took place last weekend in Brooklyn. The lineup of speakers was impressive and made for one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. But one materials-related presentation stood out. Mr. Kim and John Sarik gave a talk titled “MakerBot Printable Transistors and OLEDs or I want to be Jeri Ellsworth [...]

This is from quite some time ago, but a beautiful artwork from Philip Beesley called Hylozoic Soil which I saw at VIDA 11.0 last year. I just love the way he’s used nitinol in the work-

I’ve learned that there are 3 main challenges in working with soft circuits. The first one is to create circuitry with materials that are almost always completely exposed: a lot of thought goes into the layout of the circuit to not only avoid accidental shorts during normal wear, but also to avoid crisscrosses between conductive [...]

Augmented Photography- is questioning the meaning of photography and going beyond still image. The installation is audience aware, it means when someone approaches the photograph, doll on the picture opens her eyes and starts to blink to a viewer. If none is looking at the picture the doll’s eyes are closed. Only time-to-time, she is [...]