Week 4: Lighter: 19.10.10

In addition to functioning as a statistically-skewed polling device, Sonic Lighter is a lighter:
- Strike the flints to ignite your phone.
- Blow out the flame with your breath.
- Pinch the flame to change its size.
- Wave your finger across it and see how the flame reacts.
- Tilt the flame sideways to fry the side of your phone.

Yet Sonic Lighter is more than a lighter:
- Hold the valve to create a blowtorch flame.
- Ignite other phones by using the blowtorch flame.
- Tap the globe to see ignitions across the world.
- Customize your flame color to express your views in global opinion polls.

www.smule.com/soniclighter

week 4: Ocarina: 19.10.10

The Smule Ocarina is a wind instrument designed for the iPhone, fully leveraging its wide array of technologies: microphone input (for breath input), multitouch (for fingering), accelerometer, real-time sound synthesis, high- performance graphics, GPS/location, and persistent data connection. In this mobile musical artifact, the interactions of the ancient flute-like instrument are both preserved and transformed via breath-control and multitouch finger-holes, while the onboard global positioning and persistent data connection provide the opportunity to create a new social experience, allowing the users of Ocarina to listen to one another. In this way, Ocarina is also a type of social instrument that enables a different, perhaps even magical, sense of global connectivity.


http://smule-web.s3.amazonaws.com/ocarina/ocarina-nime2009.pdf

Week 4: Smule: 19.10.10

www.smule.com

Week 4: Eadweard Muybridge: 19.10.10

Muybridge was the man who famously proved a horse can fly. Adapting the very latest technology to his ends, he proved his theory by getting a galloping horse to trigger the shutters of a bank of cameras. This experiment proved indisputably for the first time what no eye had previously seen – that a horse lifts all four hooves off the ground at one point in the action of running. Seeking a means of sharing his ground-breaking work, he invented the zoopraxiscope, a method of projecting animated versions of his photographs as short moving sequences, which anticipated subsequent developments in the history of cinema.

Week 4: Fiona Banner: 19.10.10

Fiona Banner: For Banner these objects represent the 'opposite of language', used when communication fails. In bringing body and machine into close proximity she explores the tension between the intellectual perception of the fighter plane and physical experience of the object. The suspended Sea Harrier transforms machine into captive bird, the markings tattooing its surface evoking its namesake the Harrier Hawk.

Week 4: Anemometer: 19.10.10

Wikipedia: An anemometer is a device for measuring wind speed, and is a common weather station instrument. The term is derived from the Greek word anemos, meaning wind. The first known description of an anemometer was given by Leon Battista Alberti around 1450[1].
Anemometers can be divided into two classes: those that measure the wind's speed, and those that measure the wind's pressure; but as there is a close connection between the pressure and the speed, an anemometer designed for one will give information about both.