Photo: Donald Bell, via Flickr. By the way, USB ankle plugs aren’t just for women; I have one. It’s a huge boon while traveling, though I wish I were getting lower audio latency. Expressive technologies, like any other media, will say whatever their creators want them to say and do what their creators want them […]

Electronics and physical computing is great fun to learn as you get tangible results from your progress. It’s simple and fun to grab a kit or a bunch of components and follow on with a blog or instructable. However, as you progress to designing your own projects and circuits (or to make following other people’s […]

Since receiving my Arduino I’ve found myself looking at technology a little differently. As your post-production skills increase you tend to watch videos thinking: “I could do that”, or “I could do that if someone gave me lots of money and got out of my way”. In my post-Arduino life I now look at technology and […]

Bored with MIDI keyboards and ready to build something new? Here are some of the latest resources for using basic sensors to create new interfaces for music and other applications, aka “physical computing”: Interactive Architecture Tutorials: Ruairi Glynn’s superb blog on interactive tech has added an extensive section of links to tutorials and resources on […]

We talk about the Mac, but ultimately the Mac was a vehicle for GUIs – icons, mice, scrolling, toolboxes, painting. We talk about the iPhone, but the iPhone turned out to be about mobile photography and apps and touch. Get too hung up on the (very pricey) initial hardware, and you might miss some of the potential of what Apple is doing with what they call spatial computing. And you’ll also miss how some of these threads in interaction design started – as with those other examples – long before Apple.

I received my Arduino today, and in preparation I’ve been saving up some Arduino/Wiring/Processing links of interest to a newbie physical-computerer. If you haven’t Arduino’d before, here’s Todbot on why it’s a rocking little microcontroller. Tod also tells us how to make an Arduino Breadboard Shield, for quick circuit prototyping. You should probably familiarise yourself […]

Even as rave culture faces new hurdles in Russia, nerd culture thrives. That was the feeling at August’s Synthposium in Moscow; here’s another look.

An oversized music box takes to the streets, packed in vintage furniture and cranked by passersby, in this Portuguese sound art piece.

There’s a shift on in the worldwide community of visualists, of the growing field of people using electronic visuals as a medium for performance, art, and inquiry. As these media become more mature and more international, there’s a renewed sense of closeness among practitioners. While big media festivals focus on novelty and show, these maker-to-maker […]

Watch as a Yakovlev Yak-42 jetliner* was transformed last month into a giant percussion instrument, allowing a unique duet between vocalist (our friend Jekka) and machines. As part of last month’s Polytech Festival in Moscow, the performance is one of a number of international collaborations taking place around the museum’s art programs. A small army […]