Glass Cast Vessels from Taiwan

via Designboom - Weblog

Tittot glass manufacturer is part of the 'The Harder They Fall' exhibition currently on show at Moss Gallery in New York. Their collection of vessels are glass cast using the lost wax technique, a method which was favored by artists in France during the
Art Nouveau period. Requiring about 50 interconnected steps, the art form was revived by Mr. Heinrich Wang, Creative Director of Tittot, Taiwan in 1987.

The process begins with a hand drawing on paper which is then sculpted into a clay prototype. A silicone mould is cast in order to create a positive model in wax. The wax piece is then removed from the mould and the imperfections are removed to create a seamless piece. A wax model is then cast in a plaster mould and placed in a steam room to allow the wax to melt away slowly, exiting the mould through a small gate. Various colors of glass stones are then selected by the artist and placed inside the plaster mould and fired in a kiln, where the glass melts together, combining the colors together and filling the plaster form. When firing is complete, the piece is carefully removed from the mould and polished.

No, This Dancing Building's Bricks Are Not Falling Like Tetris

via�Gizmodo�by Brian Lam on 4/24/09

This isn't an animation, and it's not CGI and it's not a building doing the humpty dance. It's actually the old mint in downtown SF being painted by 7 perfectly mapped HD projectors.

Obscura Digital, the company behind the light show at Youtube's Symphony last week, has has used their propriety software to control a giant HD light show spread across multiple HD projectors for a Mcafee ad. Never mind the marketing purpose, this is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I think of it as using 3d graphics gear to make the real world look like video games, instead of using 3d graphics gear to make games appear realistic.

To get the image to look seamless, the software calculates distance and angle and surface shape of the building, compensating for brightness, picture shift, and other variables. This sort of thing would normally take months to plan, but they set up this example in a matter of days, due to the flexibility of the software. Here are examples of their other work, including the iGoogle launch in NYC (which used almost 20 projectors) and the youtube symphony. [Obscura�via�Fast Company]

Sky-Terra Towers Poised to Steal the Last Remnants of Sunshine from Humanity

via�Gizmodo�by Mark Wilson on 4/23/09

Sky-Terra were designed with the intent of creating a green space in the sky. But am I the only one who sees a flaw with this logic?

Sprouting between buildings, the Sky-Terra (another entrant�in the 2009�eVolo Skyscraper Competition) hopes to create a neuron-like network of parks, pools, amphitheaters and bathhouses in the sky.

So far, so good.

But what happens to those poor souls living their lives under the Sky-Terra? What about those millions of people not on holiday, who'd just like to walk to work with some shard of sun on their face?

Have you ever seen those glowing fish from way deep in the ocean, with fluorescent skin you can see in complete absence of light? That will be the human race. So really, it's not�all�bad. [Inhabitat]