Graffiti Research Lab have been developing an eye-tracking system based on open source software and off-the-shelf hardware. It is has been used to enable paralysed graffiti writer Tony Quan to create public artworks again, from his hospital bed, using some components of the Projection Bombing kit.
Decode is an exhibition of interactive artworks at the Victoria and Albert Museum until April 11th. It's a small show, but dense, high calibre, and well-presented. Most of it was working too!
Some favourites:
Fabrica - Exquisite Clock
Radiohead - House of Cards (touch screen version is on show)
Ryoji Ikeda - data.scan
Random International - Audience
Ross Phillips - Videogrid
If you have a free afternoon (or several) why not try following these steps to make your own...
Wahoo!!!
Imagine: Anish Kapoor to watch on the iPlayer.
Last night's lecture from Mike Webb, as part of the Bartlett International Lecture Series was truly something else.
Check michaelspiderwebb on Flickr for a flavour...
Reasearchers at the University of Toronto are developing an intuitive 3D sketching interface to bridge the gap between intuitive drawing and manufacture.
ILoveSketch is not yet available, however everybody can experiment with Rhonda Forever by signing up to their beta programme.
The unit contends that we have entered a new period of architectural enlightenment where customary divisions between the built and the unbuildable, the inert and the reactive, the ideal and the real, have dissolved. Experimental design is no longer a remote discipline, confined to the flimsy and vulnerable materials of representation. In the post digital age, experimental design has transgressed the resistant protocols of manufacture and mass production and occupies the everyday. Space, the matter of architecture, is no longer real or digital; it is a seamless hybrid of both.
This year the unit’s reputation in the field of making and prototyping architecture will accelerate through a series of live projects at Kielder Water & Forest Park where the unit will establish an outpost residency. The year will be defined by three expeditions to site where students will explore and establish a role for experimental architecture, and they will build them. Unlike the work of the regulated and conformist, this repertoire of built work will operate as a collective research assembly and engage with a random and diverse audience outside professional or institutional boundaries.
Kielder occupies 650 sq km of managed forest in Northumberland and is centred on the largest man-made reservoir in Northern Europe. The territory is a confluence of opposing states from the man-made and the natural to the utilitarian and recreational. It is a manufactured terrain and the unit will adopt its dense mosaic as a laboratory in which to gestate, modify and release a new species of indigenous construct.
The work will be hosted by The Kielder Art and Architecture Programme who have invited the unit to pose provocative alternatives for elemental conditions such as station, observe, adapt and mobilise. The year will begin with a short project called ‘proto-prosthetic’ a design and manufacturing exercise in 2 and 3D which will introduce students to digital design and fabrication techniques. As a thematic undertone to the year, our expeditions to Kielder will be analogous to the three main fittings of bespoke tailoring the ‘Skeleton baste’, the ‘Forward’ and the ‘Finish bar finish’. Each expedition will take a separate route to Kielder combing the aftermath of Britain’s Industrial and Manufacturing legacy.
‘Afterlife of an Island, A Will’o-wisp’ drinking/plotting table’.
Frank Gilks (y5)
A marsh gas power plant is set up as an experimental government funded initiative to create renewable energy from flooding marshland. Workers of The Lantern Marsh scheme utilise the resources available across the flooding landscape to produce a moonshine drinking spirit. Each night they gather to scheme and plot operations required for the production of this ‘Island Spirit’. 
The Pump House Table serves as a scale model of the power plant scheme on which manoeuvres can be mapped out, as well as a drinking table from which the distilled ‘Island Spirit’ can be consumed.
Frank Gilks y5 U23 frankgilks@aol.com
‘Cleansing the City’
Tim Tasker
The City of London, said to be the financial capital of the world, is experiencing a crisis which challenges the mechanics of its existence. Starved of the ancient Livery Guilds, which once bonded the people through religion, ritual and regulation, the City has become severed from its historical roots based on kinship and fraternity. Further loss of ceremony, health and community has been exacerbated by the covering of the wells, springs and spas, which had cleansed London’s people and shaped its past. Hence, the Financial Services Authority is transformed with the gradual introduction of a parasitic architecture, which seeks to elevate this regulatory body and unearth these sacred sources of purgative minerals.
Tim Tasker Y5 U23 mrtjdtasker@yahoo.co.uk 07951537631
‘Oil and Soil; The Resurrection of Milford Haven’
Andrew Yorke
Through the implementation of a Pioneering Vessel System in 2030, the project highlights a remediation avenue which initiates the longer term solution of converting the Texaco Oil Refinery in Milford Haven, Wales into a “New Haven”. The connected Vessels, which inhabit the redundant infrastructure of the refinery, utilise physical steam extraction, bioremediation and phytoremediation to cleanse the soil of toxins. This system allows the infrastructure of the refinery to remain, showing how it could be adapted and reconfigured into a new parkland that offers more than merely an industrial museum to fossil fuels.
Andrew Yorke Y5 U23 yorke.andrew@googlemail.com 07801063265