Designers here gathered to examine whether browser mania is just the latest form of "reinventing the wheel," arguing that typographers have spent centuries successfully honing the art of readability. Why add yet another meta-layer of color-coordinated symbols and rotating orbs that first need to be studied before being put into use?
Continue ReadingIt's an architecture that comes with a variety of names: vernacular, transient, tensile, liquid, primitive, nomadic. It doesn't have to mean that a building is transportable, only that it can be moved in meaningful, and preferably reversible, ways.
Continue ReadingThe scam has existed for years in various forms, but in the 1990s it moved online, where it is cheaper to organize and harder to trace.
Continue ReadingA suspected Islamic extremist of Dutch-Moroccan descent was arraigned in Amsterdam on charges of murder and terrorism today, accused of killing a director whose film denounced the mistreatment of women in Islamic communities.
Continue ReadingDespite humans' big brains and seemingly infinite storage space, when we think back to an old memory it's usually not hi-res video we conjure up but rather a still image, fuzzy around the edges and hard to keep in place.
Continue ReadingNow a team of researchers in the Netherlands have developed a computer system that quickly examines hundreds of paintings for telltale patterns. The results, they say, can lend credence to existing attributions or help dismiss them.
Continue ReadingHigh-definition television may be only just beginning to catch on, but researchers at the Japanese national broadcaster NHK are already working on a successor. The format, called Ultra High Definition Video, or UHDV, has a resolution 16 times greater than plain-old HDTV, and its stated goal is to achieve a level of sensory immersion that approximates actually being there.
Continue ReadingCollecting the garbage becomes a one-man operation: the truck pulls up, attaches a cable to the container, lifts it up, turns it over, and puts it back into the ground, an eight-minute process that also does away with mistossed bags splattering in the street.
Continue ReadingFocusing your camera phone on a code and then clicking any button launches a wireless service -- for example, the ability to buy a train ticket, check an airplane's departure time, or download a ring tone from a store display.
Continue ReadingThe history of grandiloquent architecture is a long and rich one, and Berlin-based artists Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani explored this history in Amsterdam’s ‘South Axis’ development project, a playground of gleaming office towers with interchangeable names like Eurocenter, Forum and Atrium...
Continue ReadingThe boycott suggested that Epson ink cartridges prematurely block printers from churning out more pages even when there is enough ink to keep going.
Continue ReadingWith Internet access becoming a necessity for many travelers, typing e-mail on a stained keyboard in a local cybercafe has lost its charm.
Continue ReadingThough it all sounds very Dr. Dolittle, the sounds that many animal species make can be analyzed and identified using many of the same techniques that have allowed human voice recognition to make the leap from high-tech novelty to valuable application.
Continue ReadingParticipants in the Scrapyard Challenge make simple electronic controllers using found materials like computer parts, household appliances, turntables, monitors, gadgets and clothing, which also shows how easy it is to re-use technology to serve a new purpose.
Continue ReadingBy mixing found footage with her own, and without always announcing which is which, Tan nimbly mimics the workings of memory itself. Is the image in my mind’s eye indeed my own recollection, or was it planted by family photos or grandparents’ anecdotes or TV or a dream?
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This exhibition is meant to recall that atmosphere of Francis Alÿs, while at the same time critiquing the very format of the solo exhibition – in this case, a group show standing for a solo exhibition whose protagonist is only conceptually alluded to.
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South African photographer Pieter Hugo, who rose to prominence in 2005 with ‘The Hyena and Other Men’, his controversial series of images of itinerant hyena tamers, has again made a series of large-scale colour portraits, this time of Nollywood actors.
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Self-adjustable spectacles, which let untrained wearers set the right focus themselves in less than a minute, greatly reduce the need for trained optometrists, who are rarely available in Africa and many parts of Asia. But the competition is sometimes palpable amongst the companies that want to be the first to distribute adjustable glasses in the millions...
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A Dutch engineer has invented a collapsible plastic shipping container which, he hopes, will replace the steel ones. Because it is made of a fibreglass composite, it weighs only three-quarters as much as a standard container but—more importantly— when it is empty, it can be folded down to a quarter of its size.
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