Noisy Jelly

This project is a fully working prototype made with Arduino and Max/Msp, there are absolut no sound editing in the video...
More picture at this flickr set (flickr.com/photos/raphaelplu/sets/72157629621382055/)
And download the Project pdf here (pluvinage.eu/NOISYJELLY_presskit.pdf)
Noisy jelly is a game where the player has to cook and shape his own musical material, based on coloured jelly.
With this noisy chemistry lab, the gamer will create his own jelly with water and a few grams of agar agar powder. After added different color, the mix is then pour in the molds. 10 min later, the jelly shape can then be placed on the game board,and by touching the shape, the gamer will activate different sounds.
Technically, the game board is a capacitive sensor, and the variations of the shape and their salt concentration, the distance and the strength of the finger contact are detected and transform into an audio signal.
This object aims to demonstrate that electronic can have a new aesthetic, and be envisaged as a malleable material, which has to be manipulated and experimented.
Author: Raphaël pluvinage (pluvinage.eu and twitter (twitter.com/#!/rpluvina)
& Marianne Cauvard (mariannecauvard.fr)
at L'Ensci Les ateliers (ensci.com)
Via

Army’s ‘Magic Bullet’ Will Hang Out in Midair, But Won’t Kill You

U.S. and Thai soldiers test out non-lethal cannons at Fort Surasse, Thailand, Feb. 2010. Photo: U.S. Army
This is the recipe for peak absurdity in weapons design. One part bazooka round; one part suicidal drone; one part stun round. What the U.S. Army hopes will emerge from that mix is a warhead that can loiter in midair while it hunts a human target — but won’t kill him when it finds him.
That “Nonlethal Warhead for Miniature Organic Precision Munitions” is on the Army’s wish list for small business. And for good measure, its outline for the weapon relies on a different system, one that’s just barely getting off the ground. “This effort will require innovative research and advancements in non-lethal technologies which can be packaged within a very small volume and weight,” the Army concedes.
This latest nonlethal weapon is a modification of something called the Lethal Miniature Aerial Munition System (LMAMS), something the Army explicitly compares to a “magic bullet.” That warhead “should be capable to acquire a man-size target at the system’s combat range, in less than 20 seconds, flying at an altitude of 100 meter above ground,” according to the Army’s new solicitations for small business. “If conditions for attack are not met, LMAMS will be able to loiter over the target for up to 30 minutes.”
Under this modification, the L in LMAMS would be replaced by something very un-L. “The user has expressed a strong need for a non-lethal alternative warhead for these munitions,” the Army explains. What it doesn’t explain is exactly what kind of non-lethal weapon this should be. (Chances are it won’t be a heat ray, since the power generation necessary for one is probably beyond the scope of any warhead.) The Army encourages small businesses to think about “mechanical, such as rubber balls; acoustic; chemical; electrical; or dazzle.” (Um, chemical weapons?)
One problem: the LMAMS program is in its infancy. The highest-profile example example of one of its weapons is the Switchblade drone by AeroVironment — a teeny, tiny guided missile soldiers can direct on a laptop toward a target. Elite troops in Afghanistan are expected to get the first Switchblades — the first weapon of its kind — sometime later this year.
Give the Army this: the Switchblade does demonstrate that the technology necessary for creating loitering kamikaze weapons is more than theoretical — as, on a larger scale, does the new-model Tomahawk missile, which can change direction in midair. But non-lethal weapons tend to have more flash than bang. The Air Force gave up on plans for a dazzler gun in 2008, citing practicality concerns, and the design flaws in the millimeter-wave Active Denial System, a.k.a. the “Pain Ray,” have kept it stuck in development for 15 years.
To help incentivize small businesses to outperform those recent disappointments, the Army lists some of the “potential commercial applications” for the non-lethal, loitering bazooka round. And they’re in your backyard: “crowd control for local law enforcement; border protection for Homeland Security; or temporary incapacitation of non violent criminals for local SWAT teams and/or law enforcement.” So if this weapon turns out to be too absurd for the military, there’s always the local police station.
Spencer Ackerman @'Wired'

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♪♫ Malaria! - Thrash Me

Malaria! was an experimental electronic band from Berlin formed in 1981 by Gudrun Gut and Bettina Köster (Bettina Koster) following the dissolution of Mania D with Karin Luner, Eva Gossling later Die Krupps and Beate Bartel (of Liaisons Dangereuses). Other members included Manon P. Duursma, Christine Hahn, and Susanne Kuhnke (also a member of Die Haut). They are most often associated with Neue Deutsche Welle and post-punk. Malaria!'s most popular record was New York Passage, which was top 10 in both U.S. and European independent charts and led to a tour with The Birthday Party, John Cale, and Nina Hagen. There are videos for the songs "Geld/Money," "Your Turn To Run," and "You, You" (directed by Anne Carlisle) along with a live video for "Thrash Me" featured in a German documentary called Super 80. (Wiki)

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Youth of Colour: Watched and Shot

Trayvon Martin and Mumia Abu-Jamal. One is dead. One languished on death row for thirty years. They are separated in age by a generation, separated by different locations and different life-histories, but their stories of being under surveillance, watched and shot, intersect strikingly with each other, and with many other people.

Both Trayvon and Mumia will be represented by scores of activists converging on Washington, D.C., on April 24, in an “Occupy the Justice Department” event, which joins the “Occupy” movement to the resistance movement against the criminalization of youth of color.
Trayvon and Mumia have been respective catalysts for national consciousness about police violence, prosecutorial misconduct, and also the dramatic seven-fold increase, since the 1970s, of the U.S. prison population to over 2.4 million people, more than than sixty percent of whom are people of color.
The accelerated criminalization of people of color and the poor not only feeds the prisons, it fattens a government and corporate apparatus that grows top-heavy with the wealth concentrated in the economic portfolios of the top “one percent.” As University of California sociologist, Loïc Wacquant, observes in his book, Punishing the Poor, the rise of the prisons marks a new penal state, where an ethos of surveillance and practices by police and courts “replaces the social state; . . . undermining its educational and assistance missions by devouring their budgets and stealing their staff.”
Trayvon and Mumia are just two Americans among many others, particularly youth of color, and many dissenters, who have been under surveillance and face its deadly effects. We Are All Suspects Now is the title of a book by ColorLines executive editor, Tram Nguyen, writing of immigrant communities after 9/11 and the problems faced by ever larger numbers of us in today’s surveillance state. Just in the last two months, a litany of names of dead youth now haunt us, all slain in conflict with police: Ramarley Graham, Justin Sipp, Kendrec McDade, Dante Price, Rekia Boyd, Kenneth Smith, Shaima Alawadi, Ervin Jefferson. Still fresh are the memories of other people of color similarly lost: Amadou Diallo, Vincent Chin, Michael Cho, Sean Bell, Anthony Biaz, Oscar Grant, Fong Lee, Tyisha Miller, Matthew Shepard, James Byrd, Mark Duggan, Eleanor Bumpurs, and more...
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