Tag: tech art

The Art of Science: Symbols of Universal (Wireless) Connection

Technological Mandala 05, 2012
Technological Mandala 05, 2012

The mandala is an important symbol in both Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions, both as art form and as spiritual practice. In extremely simple terms, a mandala is a geometrically–based representation of an interconnected universe or cosmos. They are usually painted or drawn, although some are made painstakingly of sand and then swept away after their completion, as a symbol of the impermanence of all things. Italian artist Leonardo Ulian makes mandalas out of a more contemporary material – electronic components, including resistors, capacitors and microchips. Beautiful, intricate and delicate, they hint at a new interpretation of the idea of interconnectedness – the wireless kind.  Although he’s using an ancient religious style, Ulian refers to his artworks as “ephemeral gizmos”, which, like sand or new technology, can be quickly swept away.

See more of Leonardo Ulian’s work at his website.

The Art of Science – Crowdsourcing Sheep

Aaron Koblin is an American tech-design prodigy who gave a TED talk in his 20s and now has an amazing job with Google. So why was he paying people 2 cents a pop to draw pictures of sheep on computers? I’ll let him explain in his own words.

“The Sheep Market is a collection of 10,000 hand-drawn sheep from online workers collected through the Mechanical Turk. The Mechanical Turk is a web service created by Amazon to provide “artificial artificial intelligence,” now known more commonly as “crowdsourcing.” I was immediately intrigued by the concept of using thousands of idle brains, and have long been impressed by projects like SETI@home, which use idle CPU time on people’s computers to tackle problems too big for a single machine or cluster. This however, was different; these aren’t idle boxes, these are people. I wanted to visualize this and think about this kind of system, which will inevitably become more common.”  (source)

Koblin created a tool for recording drawings and posted the tool online paying $.02 (USD) for each worker’s sheep.  He was able to view, approve, and reject each sheep (662 drawings didn’t meet “sheep-like” criteria). Finally, he gathered all 10,000 sheep into a matrix on a website, which he describes as “a market place for inspecting and collecting the individual sheep.”

The resulting artwork has been exhibited in Spain, Japan, the US, the Netherlands and Australia. You can examine it at the macro and micro level (even see how each sheep was drawn) at the Sheep Market website and see many more projects at Koblin’s own site.