Xylophone Bicycle Bridge: Designboom Contest Entry

Fantastic Xylophone Bicycle Bridge Plays Music As You Ride | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World
Inhabitat posted about this beautiful design for an environmental instrument. As a cyclist rides over the bridge the keys play a tune. The design was an entry in the Designboom's Seoul Cycle Design competition, and the article includes a map with the potential sites in Seoul. I love this not just because I'm a musician and a cyclist, but because it contributes to the sonic landscape in the city.

There's so much noise on the roads here in L.A. During the recent CicLAvia I was struck by the silence of the street full of cyclists. You could hear people talking as they rode along, children laughing, a quiet background of clicks and whirs as chains adjusted and gears shifted. Now and again a bell was rung. The Xylophone Bridge gives the bike and the river a voice to sing together. A crossing is celebrated, and  I think this is art because of the symbolism.

Kinetic Wall Sculptures

O, I love these things. They are decorative machines. They are witty and wooden. The craft of engineering divorced from function becomes art. In the digital age, I miss the gears showing, and I believe people more regress to magic as the mechanics shrink and hide.

Spiral Wall: Processing with Arduino and Servo

SPIRAL_WALL: PROCESSING ARDUINO SERVO on Vimeo Pretty cool concept here. The fabric is being manipulated by motor controlled by the laptop. Its easy to see the application in theater, or some large venue on an entirely different scale.Gotta love Arduino; you can make anything with their parts, judging from what I find online. I’m drooling over an accelerator-midi thing myself.

Fabio Viale: Sculpture

This wonderful video of sculptor Fabio Viale demonstrates one of my fundamental axioms about the art: sculpture is the study of materials and their properties. I think that to sculpt well is to use a material in such a way that it expresses its properties without cliché. You can appreciate the possibilities of a vessel shape or form differently when its made of distinct materials, whether its wood, clay, metal, or stone. By the way, I found it at What We Do Is Secret