Would you like to be free?

This site is very intriguing...could you cut the cord from your social media?

http://suicidemachine.org/

This makes me want to add Metalsmithing/Jewelry to the growing list of things I know how to do. She made that crown-pearl-i'm-a-smack-you-doo-hicky. I'm pretty sure she can do anything. http://luxirare.com/vintage-rings/

I will just have to make this in 2-D acrylic. Next term. When the shop is open again. I am sad that it's closed for break :(

clever camo

http://thechive.com/2009/12/09/the-boss-will-never-know-3-photos/

an elegant solution

How to cut a mathematically beautiful bagel. Or, how to impress your friends with a bagel-chain.

http://www.georgehart.com/bagel/bagel.html

I should get a merit badge...

Check out these embroidery skills. I've never done this before, and I'm happy with how it turned out! I was totally unsure about it at first, but glad that I went with my first instinct in terms of design and placements. These are going to be the "buttons" that you push to make the dress work. They're placed in places that range from "ok" to "slap-worthy" zones of the body.

The lower back is an area that I consider to be a gray area. It can be a controlling gesture to touch somebody here, or an intimate gesture.

This is the embroidery on the lower back:


Over the chest, a for sure no-touch area!


The LED matrix isn't tacked on yet, since I don't have the second arduino sewn in and then they need to be sewn together.

There are two more buttons that I embroidered today, with similar looks to the two above. I think I've earned my sewing badge by this point.

Progress!

The LED matrix dress is coming along nicely, and now it even has a conceptual meaning!

My awesome friend Andrew Parnell is helping me with the code and things. This is a picture of us testing out the code he whipped up (in like, a minute, it was crazy) by modifying something he'd written a year ago.


This is where some more intense sewing sets in, connecting all those rows and columns into the holes on the arduino.


It looks nice and messy underneath the top layer of fabric, but that's alright. A little glue sealant and scissor snips fixes that right up!



Here's the first "button" being embroidered on, when all is said and done these will trigger the different animations. The concentric circles are supposed to evoke a feeling of ripples.



Here's a closer shot of it:



The dress is going to be complete by Monday. I'll have a full post and video documentation, and even an artist statement to boot.

Testing out some embroidery

Taken with the webcam at work, since the cameras are all checked out...

This one isn't finished, it's going to have more circles coming off of it.

I Am Luminous Deer

This is my personal Logo.

Take that.

Everybody's Sewing for the Weekend. Ok, maybe just me.

I'm making a sewn LED matrix. I spent most of my weekend working on this, and, it's pretty sweet.



Here I am prepping each of the 64 LEDs in hot glue (I only burned myself once!)



The long vertical and the horizontal traces were sewn on my newly inherited retro sewing machine, and each LED was stitched in by hand. I curled the positive end into a loop, stitched it down onto the horizontal trace, then poked the negative lead through and down to a separate piece of fabric, then curled and sewed that lead onto the negative trace.



The Lilypad Arduino is going to be used to drive my LED display, since it was made to be sewn and is pretty friendly to a total arduino newbie like myself.



Only one LED decided to snap off during the sewing project. In a moment of shear craziness, I started heating up my soldering iron. Thankfully I came to my senses and thought "This is why I prepped extra LEDs"



Here's a test! It isn't actually programmed or sewn to the Lilypad yet. This is just a test done by running a blink script on the arduino while having certain traces connected.




Anyways, that's where I'm at!

Finally a service I could get behind.

Oh yes it's that time, time for another link for you to follow. I love the internet.

http://www.catsforgold.com/

Musings

I just started cutting out fabric for my LED matrix dress. It's going to happen, and it's going to be awesome. The colors will be different than what I'd imagined, but what can you do when shipping from China is so unpredictable. From white on white to red on black.

I'm picking up some 3D prints tomorrow from the shop, I can't wait to see them! The one that's done for sure is my remix, and the other is a sculpture.

Hurrrghhh time to think of what to write for my term paper.

My two favorite hand-painted comic strips:

http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minus4.html

http://www.tinykittenteeth.com/

It was hard to find a list of more of the social-issue-related ones, but this Japanese company makes these hilarious bras once a year to highlight social trends or issues.

This bra is a countdown clock that stops when a ring is set into it. It's supposed to be for the Japanese woman who is actively hunting for a husband, as recent trends show more and more women being proactive in searching for a mate.

Here's an article about it, http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE54C1E720090513

And here's a pic of it




A short list of some of the bras can be seen here, it's totally worth a look:
http://inventorspot.com/articles/best_8_bizarre_bras_triumph_inte_8275

Kind of Gross

This is kind of gross, but also quite intriguing. Did they kill the flies or just find dead ones?

They have more up:
http://curiousphotos.blogspot.com/2009/10/creative-art-in-fly-dead-body-15-pics.html


Here's an interesting bit of marketing, using live flies

http://adoholik.com/2009/10/31/eichborn-publishing-flyvertising/

Nice Costume

http://testroete.com/index.php?location=head

He based it on a mod popular in many games. I like how he uses the faceted look that game art has so far away from to his advantage.

Hey....I spot an Eames Lounge!

Also these old Encyclopedia Britannica commercials are awesome.

It was done with a combo of stop motion and CGI. Very nice.

Origami In the Pursuit of Perfection from MABONA ORIGAMI on Vimeo.

All the origami parts are real, not CGI created. Excellent...

THE MAKING OF AN ORIGAMI KOI from MABONA ORIGAMI on Vimeo.

Stop motion, this one is particularly gorgeous. It seems to flow very naturally.

Just for fun

If you're having a lousy rainy day in Portland, visiting this site can make you pretty happy.

http://www.andieandmike.org/bubblecam-push.stm

They wrote their own code and built their own unit to make this run.

A little sad though, I found out those plants are all fake.

I'm reading some books on stop motion animation, It's something I'd like to work on for at least a project or two this year.

This animation is totally awesome, and something I'd like to try myself. Perhaps a slight NSFW on the 25-30 secondish mark? Hilarity.

VIDEOGIOCO by Donato Sansone from Enrico Ascoli - Sound Design on Vimeo.

Male Pattern Baldness, or Male Baldness Pattern?

Etched wood smells really nice

oh my goodness i made a thing

I was trained on the laser cutter today! That machine is my new best friend. These rings were fun to design and make. Much less expensive than a real rock, these were made with scrap acrylic!

I like the juxtaposition between an expensive object made with cheap materials. And the stereotypical wedding ring shape is hilarious for me, since people are always bugging me about "why aren't you engaged yet". Well thhhppppt! I make my own ring.

Misinformation

I didn't read the whole article yet, but the section on Misinformation Studies was particularly interesting to me.

http://cogprints.org/599/0/199802009.html

Childhood memories falsified. Being from a large family, and having lots of childhood stories told to me over and over again, I know that some things that I remember are not wholly my own memories. Some things I remember almost photographically never really happened at all. Memories of relatives that died when I was very young, do I truly remember them, or does my brain just cobble something together out of the stories that I heard?

Stacking

I'm gonna start taking a log of things that I like that stack, because that one of the things I think is essential about the TC-100 Tableware that I'm going to remix. The tableware is all about the stackability.

This is a set of rings, sold separately, that you can stack on your finger to create a scene. They cost 12 bucks a piece! That is crazy. I mean, it's cute design and all, but I seriously wouldn't want to drop $48 just so that I have a complete set to work with. And what if I want more trees? I dislike the squirrel being the same color as the fox! I will just make my own, thank you drive through!

I think this has potential outside the design remix as well. What other kinds of things do I want to stack...

Hello Kids

Since my main wordpress blog feed won't play nice with the UO Contemporary Design Blogroll, I'm moving my contemporary design posts over to here. You can still see my main blog on my home page, www.KateSessions.com. I'm going to revert that one back to a sketchblog.

Let the remix begin

So I've been assigned Nick Roerichts TC-100 Tableware

for my design remix project, where we take a very designed object and remix it. It's kind of ambiguous as to how. And that's on purpose, they don't really want to push us in any direction. The output requirement is a 2D representation of the new object, but many people construct the final project in miniature.

It seemed like everybody was drawing really cool stuff. Stuff with real complexity and potential. Like a kitchen-aid mixer, or Air Jordans. I was kind of disappointed in my draw.

This stuff has some awesome potential. It was designed with conservation of space in mind, secure stack-ability. I think Zara said that it was all over the place, and especially used on trains. I already have some remixes in mind.

Links For Steven

So these are some things that I came up with for Steven to look at.

For some interesting processes and techniques, I suggested http://nathanielstern.com/2009/night-work/
It's a really cool integration of traditional print techniques and more modern tech like video and digital frames. Not so much in the look of Steven's work, but for sure a process I'd like him to look at.

Always a favorite of mine, Jim Mahfood's work http://www.40ozcomics.com/ . He's a comic/skater/punk/etc. artist who does really great illustrations and illustration installations. A lot of his stuff has a clean, vector look to it that Steven has in a lot of his work. I love the illustration work he does on the female body