Grafitti Research Lab: LED Throwies

LED Throwies (Video)

LED Throwies is a project from Grafitti Research Lab, a division of the EyeBeam OpenLab. It involves hooking LEDs up to a small battery and using a strong but miniature magnet to make it stick to metallic surfaces. As the name suggests, the typical mode of application is simply to throw them at the target.

“Throwie” is a reference to graffiti “throwups”, quick and dirty pieces usually done with a single layer of paint and an outline. The LED Throwies could point the way to a new form of urban street art, adding color and magic to the hood. Look at the video on the Grafitti Research Lab site for a nice preview of a Throwie “party”.

There are no detailed credits on the Grafitti Research Lab page, but there is reason to believe that Evan Roth aka fi5e (who created the Grafitti Analysis piece) is involved somehow. Since the OpenLab is dedicated to public domain R&D, there is a publicly available detailed recipe published on instructables.com.

More images on flickr/tags/ledthrowies.

Realities:United: SPOTS media facade

Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz is getting new eyes. The SPOTS media facade opens Sunday on the Park Kolonnaden building. SPOTS will be a gallery for a series of curated art projects for public space. Commissioned by ad agency Café Palermo Pubblicità for HVB Immobilien AG, the installation was designed by Realities:United, a Berlin-based architecture studio with previous experience in creating large-scale light installations. Their BIX facade for Kunsthaus Graz garnered much international attention, and won them more than a few awards.

SPOTS will last for 18 months, with four commissioned works by Jim Campbell, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Carsten Nicolai and Realities:United in collaboration with John Dekron. The selection was curated by Andreas Broeckmann, director of the Transmediale festival. Visitors to Transmediale 2006 will have a chance to see all four works, as they are shown one per day in a special showing for the festival.

It should be noted that Potsdamer Platz is a problematic space in Berlin. Depending on who you ask, it’s either a symbol of regeneration or an attempt to erase history. A vibrant city center in the 1920s, it was practically destroyed in World War II and then divided by the Berlin Wall. It became a no-go zone, empty and desolate.

With the Wall down in 1989, the empty Potsdamer Platz became a prime investment opportunity and saw aggressive commercial development. The area is now dominated by corporate headquarters, three cinema multiplexes, restaurants and a shopping mall. The Sony Center is one of the most ambitious building projects in the area, and has achieved iconic status. While detractors will lecture you on the horrors of modern architecture and inorganic urban planning, the area is a de facto success, with 70 000 visitors per day.

The official opening is Sunday November 27 (tomorrow) at 17:00, so if you’re in the neighbourhood you can catch the official presentation of the project. Be sure to bring warm clothes.

The public beta of the Flash Player version 8 (known as 8 Ball) is now available. Download the uninstaller while you’re at it, things are bound to break. The Flash community is very excited about this release, to find out why you can take a look at Colin Moock’s video from the public demo, or read this more tech-oriented blog post from Franto. It looks as if Flash will finally have pixel manipulation, filter effects, blend modes and PNG format support with 24 bit alpha channel. And even if you don’t know what that means, you can still look forward to the millions of sites that will use all those effects in the next few months.

Mario Klingemann has created a SWF 8 Version Converter which allows you to fool Flash into thinking your old SWF’s are really version 8 by hacking the version number embedded in the file. He also gives the very sensible advice that the first thing you should do with the new player, is to test all your old sites to see if and how they break.