In photography the technique of light painting consists in drawing with a light source by keeping the shutter opened for a long period. By doing so one is able to doodle with light, create manipulations, merge objects and landscapes without the need for post-production techniques. The technique was extensively used by the surrealists and regained strength recently as one form of experimental photography [take a look at some Flickr groups dedicated to this technique].

In this context the term Light Art Performance Photography was coined referring to photographs that originate on performances that take place between the opening and closing of the shutter resulting on a single shot that registers this brief period in which a sensor or film is exposed to light.

“Lapp is descended from light drawing and has been developed into its own art form. Lapp, as the evolution of light drawing, is complemented with additional elements in form of light figures, colors and light forms to create such a special view of the general view.”

The light painting technique plays an important role in Marginalia Project’s history and was explored from an aesthetic perspective in one video experiment of ours and our first interactive installation, Marginalia 1.0 beta.

via lapp-pro

A strange story from Japan: a particular train line had a higher suicide rate than other train lines. A music specialist found out the that the alarming departure sound of the train psychologically affected people, creating despair or uneasiness. So the train company changed the sound in some stations.

Part of the series re-design soundscape, the Musical Kettle by Yuri Suzuki plays your favorite tunes when the water boils, discussing noise produced in domestic environments through the “re-design” of apparatuses used in this context thus inserting extraordinary elements that alter the soundscape creating tension in the relationship between humans and sounds.

The video showing this piece is being shown in the international exhibition Dissidence.nonplaces & device art [curated by Machiko Kusahara and Eduardo Navas] of the event Transitio_MX03 Festival Internacional de Artes Electrónicas y Video: Autonomías del Desacuerdo. Until October 10th the video can be seen at the Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City.

Möbius-Strip Music Box by Ranjit Bhatnagar

A simple and curious example that joins mathmatical experiment and a challenging aesthetical proposal , the music box by Ranjit Bhatnagar uses the Moebius strip to loop a melody excerpt. Moebius strip is an object that was named after one of its researchers, August Ferdinand Möbius, and it has the peculiarity of being a one-sided surface, allowing one to go through its whole extension continously without ever stopping to touch it.

In this inventive proposal for the creation of a continous loop, there is a particular characteristic: after being played the first time, the excerpt is repeated with an inverted scale (upside-down), than going back to the original scale, and so forth, creating an interesting composing challenge.

Make Magazine, published by O’Reilly (the same that is responsible for various books in the field of programming and technology), keeps its blog in which, among several posts, emerge interesting creations of DIY (do it yourself) culture, with homemade and accessible solutions for functional or purely aesthetical proposals. This music box came to us in this context.

In contrast to the title of the previous post, we thought it would be curious to mention a short presentation text of Make: Online: 

Void your warranty, violate a user agreement, fry a circuit, blow a fuse, poke an eye out. Make: The risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things… Welcome to Make: Online!

via Make Blog