Digital forming is a new London based company set up to democratise the personalisation of everyday products. As customers gradually demand greater freedom of choice, designers and brands are faced with new challenges in product diversity, responding through innovative product assembly strategies, 2D interactive pattern modification and coloring of predefined shapes.

Digital forming novel technology offers the modification of products material behaviors, colour and form and presents a software that allows users to view and personalise the products they are about to buy in a 3D online environment. An array of lifestyle consumer products can be rotated and spun within a virtual 3D space. These products can then be modified in real time – stretched, twisted, embossed, assembled – all with the simple movement of the mouse. Users can adjust form, choose colour and material, save designs in an online library, and purchase when ready for delivery within 2 weeks.

Visit the Digital Forming blog for more information.

Written and directed by Chris Cairns, Neurosonics Audiomedical, is a wicked film about “the kingdom of the unreal but also a higher state of being, ultimately free of the limitations of the material world through the agency of science, technology, and imagination.”

Make sure to drop by their website to check out the stills.

Results Under Actions is a text-based project and is designed with mobility and adaptation in mind. Transportable wall structures are used to display narrative footnotes or historical slogans that embody the stories of our built environment. Each is a graphic source with minimal text,  presented to encourage many, varied and unique interpretations.

At the center of this project is a system of display panels that are connected into thin, long wall structures.  These are displayed in pre-determined public places and is being documented from varied perspectives. The documentation preserves not only the wall as it is presented, but also the reaction and responses of the public.

Continue reading here.

Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. It allows you to see how the machine is working, revealing the computer’s uncanny insights and inadvertent errors such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to our current and future world where digital histories are as important – if not more important – than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant – for now. Fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, and this kind of data is indispensable but far from infallible.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

This film touches upon the notion treated in an essay by André Corboz, in which he suggests to read the land / the actual architectonic landscape as palimpsest. Consisting of a layered up information structure dating back to ancient times, the land is constantly rewritten on and erased by its inhabitants.

Using animation within a space set up by a 2 1/2d technique, the film wants to explore our take on both tactics and strategies within the cultural landscape – reading it as an intertwined tissue where figure-ground relations are abandoned.

The relationship between photography and static digital architecture is undeniable, as is the case with cinema and animated digital architecture. At this year’s Mundos Digitales conference, 3 D artist, Alex Román reviewed the main aesthetic features in this field, the need for photorealism, the structure as protagonist and the importance of its environment, the language of films and photography, as well as the techniques used to intentionally bring together the seventh art and architecture.

The above short film is footage from his project “The Third & The Seventh”. There are more teasers where this came from. Check it out!

It has become a beloved ritual at Dana-Farber: Every day, children who come to the clinic write their names on sheets of paper and tape them to the windows of the walkway for ironworkers to see. And, every day, the ironworkers paint the names onto I-beams and hoist them into place as they add floors to the new 14-story Yawkey Center for Cancer Care.

Click here to read the full story.

MOM & POPism, is an exhibition curated by Billi Kid reinterpreting James and Karla Murray’s latest book, Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York, in unique collaboration with many of today’s hottest graffiti and street artists.

Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York is a breathtaking visual guide to New York City’s cultural heritage, with special emphasis on the historic streets and ethnic shops that have defined its many neighborhoods. Meticulously photographed, its powerful images of time-worn institutions were printed at close to life-size scale and installed on the Gawker Media roof, becoming canvases on which select graffiti and street artists were invited to leave their indelible marks.

Pierre Fisher and Justin Meekel, two 20-something French artists, decided to spend their summer in a rather unique way. Inspired by a  1960s guide book called Le Guide de la France Mystérieuse (The Guide of Mysterious France) which listed odd, unknown places all over the country, they decided to update and create their own map of mystery by researching bizarre corners all over the country – small villages, communities, suburbs with unpronounceable names.

They got hold of an old Peugeot in which they installed a hand-made printing press, along with a computer, scanner, paper cutter and a giant stapler. Then, with a little financing, they set off on what they call their “Verdure Tour 2009” (Vegetation Tour 2009). The aim was simple – stop at each “place of mystery”, meet locals, and then create and print small guide books for every location. The 16-page booklets, printed in 100 copies, were distributed throughout their journey.

Read the full story on Dazed Digital.

Photo credit: Fifth Floor Gallery

On Saturday, August 8th, urban planner, James Rojas unveiled one of his interactive city models at Fifth Floor and invites the public to play and dream about the future of Chinatown.  The economic, social, and built environment of Chinatown is rapidly changing and the model will capture that energy through an interactive public participation process.

The 4×8 ft. model of Chinatown includes Los Angeles State Historical Park (formerly known as the Cornfields) and portions of the LA River and will highlight the area’s topography, streets, and blocks. It is designed to inspire the minds of the participants through its grand interventions, vivid use of materials, colors, textures and by allowing the public to touch and imprint their vision on it.

Fifth Floor will become an impromptu urban planning “store” with shelves lining the wall that will host an array of small, colorful buildings. Visitors can take these buildings off the shelves and place them on the model located in the middle of the gallery to create their ideal urban form. The model will constantly change as the work builds upon the contributions of others.

This technique, conceived by Rojas, facilitates public participation in the urban planning process by using art as an interactive, creative medium to help people think about their community. The evolving exhibition mimics the dynamic and collective nature of life in Chinatown. These activities reflect how varied groups of players—strangers, neighbors, friends—interact to create a sense of place in Chinatown.