Cool Hunting
Niklas Roy is a German artist with engineering skills, a quirky sense of humor and an interest in robotics. Dokumat 500 is creation he completed last year—it's a fully automatic documentary robot. The camera is mounted on a tripod on powered wheels and has servo motors that control the pan and tilt of the camera. The 'brain' of the unit arbitrarily (algorithmically, actually) decides when to stop and start recording, which way to move and how to pan and tilt. There are infrared sensors on the feet that keep the Dokumat from bumping in to things or falling down steps, but they have nothing to do with determining what to film. The entire thing is explained in this quirky video that Roy made to document the Dokumat.
The Dokumat 500 does best in crowded situations where people are forced to interact with it as seen in this video it created at last year's Art Forum in Berlin.
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Since 2006 Thai artist Kittiwat Unarrom (whose family also runs a bakery) has used dough as his medium to sculpt gruesome renditions of hand, feet, heads, torsos and other body parts. The results are unnervingly realistic with eyes, lips and other details constructed out of cashews, raisins and the like. A lack of hair and blood-like glazes make the work all the more creepy....
Takeo Okamoto, an established sushi chef in his native Japan discovered his calling for ice sculpture and moved to the iciest place he could think of, Alaska.; Art; Cool Hunting Video; interviews; sculpture; Takeo Okamoto, an established sushi chef in his native Japan discovered his calling for ice sculpture and moved to the iciest place he could think of, Alaska. http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1079053391http://www.brightcove.com/channel.jsp?channel=37009902 // By use...
Takeo Okamoto, an established sushi chef in his native Japan discovered his calling for ice sculpture and moved to the iciest place he could think of, Alaska. Winner of several international awards, including a Silver Medal in the 1998 Olympics, Takeo now runs Okamoto Studio with his son Shintaro in New York City. We were introduced to them through Jeremy Mangan, an artist whose coffee paintings we admired. When we spoke with Jeremy he mentioned that he also sculpts ice—he's in fact Okamoto's principal carver—the result of Jeremy and Shintaro having met in an art class at Hunter College. We decided right away to make a video of the studio and, after some deliberation, we realized CH mascots Otis and Logan would make the perfect subjects for a video and a great feature at our 50th Episode party. Guests were treated to the breathtaking sculptures of the Sealyham Terriers themselves and to raw footage from the video of them being made.
In this, our 50th episode, we visit the Catskill, NY studio of artist Brian Dewan. His sculptures are pre-digital, unpredictable electronic musical instruments. Dewanatron, as he calls the genre, is a family of instruments which hazard unpredictable behaviors and self playing tendencies. They make all previous and future instruments obsolete. We also bring you to Pierogi Gallery where we first learned about Dewan.
Meet Watts-- he's a 2 foot tall bucket of bolts made from old and new found parts. Watts can be found among many other robot sculptures at Bennett Robot Works. No, it's not yet another Social Networking site with a silly angle. It's the portfolio of Gordon Bennett, the artist inspired by Norman Bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy's visions of the Modern Age. Bennett...
With his high-concept mechanics, artist Jonathan Schipper's latest exhibition, "Irreversibility," is just as stunningly clever as the animatronic sculpture we watched him build a few years ago. Held at Brooklyn's Pierogi Gallery, the show is both a spectacle and showcase of recent sculptures and installations by Schipper, including "The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle," (pictured above) in which a live, head-on collision takes...
