Elysium is an allegorical videogame with no objective other than to find your way through a maze of afterlives. Levels linked by hidden portals bring a continuum of beliefs–theistic and agnostic, mystical and rational, eastern and western– into dialogue. Download and Play Elysium (beta version – mac/pc/linux compatible) The game was developed during the 48 hour Art Hack [...]
Doomsday approaches, once again, on 12/21/12. How Does it End? A countdown to the end of the world narrates 21 visions of global destruction: nuclear war, environmental collapse, rising sea levels, pandemics, solar flares, asteroid impacts, etc…. The countdown begins on December 20th, 2012, at 11:43 pm, and runs for 17 minutes. Gather your friends [...]
Bio-artist / Life-hacker Adam Zaretsky teaches students experimental do-it-yourself genomics in a “vivo” lab at Pittsburgh’s Mellon Institute. Observing live embryos through microscopes, they consider the aesthetics and ethics of playing god.
Robert Zubrin, author and aerospace engineer, has the blueprints to build a colony on Mars. He and NASA Ames researcher Margarita Marinova explain how and why humans will one day turn the Red Planet green, establishing the next frontier of technological innovation and seeding the universe with new branches of life. This video is one [...]
Recent advancements in touch screens and gestural interfaces have revolutionized human-computer interaction. What if these same devices could allow non-human species to use computers? At the Pittsburgh Zoo, Max Hawkins, a young software artist, and Michelle Farmerie, a zookeeper and primatologist, have teamed up to develop interactive apps for orangutans. They believe this software will [...]
Clouds features prominent and emerging computer hackers, media artists, and critics talking about the creative use of code, the future of data, interfaces, and computational visuals. It is presented as a series of conversational vignettes centered around thematic topics. The subjects of the film float in a black void, their figures composed of tiny points [...]
This is what happens when videogame technology and cinematography converge. James George and Alexander Porter lead a workshop on hybrid 3D filmmaking at Resonate.io festival in Belgrade, Serbia. “We’re surrounded by systems, devices and machineries generating heaps of raw graphic novelty. We built them, we programmed them, we set them loose for a variety of [...]
The first privately funded mission to the Moon will launch in 2015, pioneered by a legendary roboticist and his team of students. Pittsburgh’s Astrobotic Technology, a company founded by David Gump and Red Whittaker, plans to send a series of robotic explorers to the Moon to prospect for precious metals, water and other raw materials [...]
Lowry Burgess, a pioneer space artist, has over 30 years of experience collaborating with NASA and creating visionary artworks in a cosmic context. In 2013, a robotic mission from Carnegie Mellon –the first commercially funded lunar expedition– will send his art to the Moon.
A story about the search for two identical pieces of popcorn. Blending fact and fiction, science and mysticism.
An interview with Doug Vakoch, Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
The newly opened Center for PostNatural History in Pittsburgh is the first museum that seeks to catalog man-made biological organisms. The man behind the museum is not a scientist, but an artist, one member of a growing DIY community that is exploring–and making–a new meaning of life as we know it. AMERICAN CHESTNUT MOSQUITOS BIO-STEEL [...]
The 2011 Wats:ON? Festival at Carnegie Mellon examined our cultural relationship with speed, and the effects of bending and warping between the ultra slow and the very fast. A series of documentary shorts compress and present three days of events: a High-Speed photo booth, shooting a stop-motion music video, and interviews with Festival curators and keynote Jeff Lieberman [...]
Lauren Mullineaux is an astronaut of the deep sea. As a marine biologist who studies hydrothermal vent communities, she has become intimately familiar with one of the most extreme habitats on Earth, miles below the ocean’s surface. In an interview recorded at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Mullineaux narrates a descent into the abyss aboard the [...]
A people sustained by their herd of reindeer, the Tsaatan people remain one of the few completely nomadic communities in Mongolia. In recent years 20th century technologies have become commonplace features of nomadic dwellings, equipped with solar panels, dishes and televisions sets. Cradled in the mountains, hours from the nearest village, the Tsaatan people’s remote [...]
