Archive for April, 2009

ToDo @ FAKE IT… Till you make it!

29 April 2009

 

On the occasion of the FAKE IT… Till you make it! Festival in Vienna, we’ve been invited to talk about some of our works and introduce the workshop on data visualization and interactive video installations held by Stefan Kainbacher.

FAKEitMAKEit

“Fake it till you make it!” is a 14 days of high-DIY event, proposing new solutions and approaches to create products through the combination of hardware hacking, graphic, visual communication and product design.

Under the motto “enhanced environment”, 3 workshops will take place, aiming to re-think, transform and repurpose objects: how spaces and products can be used beyond the intended, often limited usage of the originally producer? 

If you happen to be there on the 2nd of May, come and say Hi!

((thanx a lot to Stefan for the invitation, looking forward to see you all in Vienna!))

Spamghetto @ Design Crisis exhibition

23 April 2009

We even had some spare time to take some pictures before the opening. :)

exhibition info: www.designcrisis.it

The real wallpaper
The real wallpaper
The real wallpaper
The real wallpaper
The real wallpaper

Spamghetto: set-up

21 April 2009

Setting up the wall for  the Spamghetto wallcovering at the Design Crisis exhibition. Opening April 22 at 18 p.m. (Via Pestalozzi 4, Spazio P4, Milan)

http://www.todo.to.it/#projects/spamghetto

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Now with real spam!

10 April 2009

Spamghetto: now with 2000 real spam messages subjects’ scraped from our Gmail’s accounts!
Since we were polling gmail way too quickly, I even had my account locked for ’suspect’ activity for 3 hours :)
A time.sleep() with some random interval was enough to cheat the watchdog.
By the way… we used the lovely Nodebox for the generative graphics (output to PDF) and libgmail to get data from Gmail.

Check the link below, it’s a bigger version (2400*2400 px) with readable text…

Spamghetto, now with real spam!

Spamghetto, now with real spam!

Spamghetto project description EN/ITA

9 April 2009

EN – Spamghetto

the junk-mail wallpaper

Everyday our mailboxes are flooded with unsolicited offers of porn material, pirate software, viagra, illegal financial services and advice on women seduction: if this is annoying for the average user, we really love it.
A quick glance at the spam mailbox always provides fresh inspiration: bizarre subjects guides us in the quest for the definitive answer to fundamental humans’ problems.
But the crisis is striking and we must recycle. So, instead of sweeping spam under the carpet, we decided save some junk-mail in order to turn it into a wallpaper for your house before it’s too late: someday a brilliant scientist will find the definitive solution to eradicate from the web the bittersweet pleasure of spam.
Spamghetto is not like your grandma’s wallpaper. If you provide us with your room’s dimensions, we can, with our generative software, produce a design that wraps and folds around all the objects that sit on the on the wall’s surface.

 

 

ITA – Spamghetto

l’unica carta da parati a base di mail-spazzatura

Ogni giorno le nostre mailbox sono inondate da poco gradite offerte di materiale pornografico, di software pirata, di viagra senza prescrizione, di infallibili strumenti di seduzione e di schemi finanziari truffaldini: molti ne farebbero volentieri a meno, a noi piace da morire.
Uno sguardo alla cartella dello spam porta sempre nuova meraviglia: titoli dalla bizzarra sintassi ci guidano nella ricerca della risposta definitiva ai problemi fondamentali dell’essere umano.
C’è la crisi, urge riciclare. Al posto di nascondere lo sporco sotto il tappeto, affezionati a queste incursioni nel lato-b delle nostre emozioni, abbiamo deciso di trasformarlo in tappezzeria per portarlo sui muri di casa vostra prima che qualche scienziato troppo brillante trovi l’antidoto in grado di sradicare dal web per sempre il piacere dolceamaro dello spam.
Spamghetto non è come la tappezzeria della nonna. Se ci fate avere le misure delle vostre pareti, possiamo, con un software generativo scritto ad-hoc, disegnare un motivo che si adatti ai muri di casa vostra avvolgendo e abbracciando tutti gli ostacoli che incontra sul suo percorso.

 

Wanna get a larger boner? So easy to be bigger! :)

Spamghetto prototype

8 April 2009
walpaper detail

Quick preview of a computational spam-based wallpaper to be presented later on this month at the Salone del Mobile in Milan. Full project description and more sketches will be published soon as we finish coding the system.
Wanna get a larger boner? So easy to be bigger! :) Read the rest of this entry →

Oscar 1.0 released!

8 April 2009
The Oscar user interface.

The Oscar user interface.

ToDo is happy to release its first free, open-source Mac Os X application.

You can download it here!

Who is Oscar?

Oscar is an OSC-to-Flash bridge, much like flosc.

Its purpose is to make Flash based applications  communicate with other OSC (and TUIO) enabled devices and applications in the same network.

Oscar is made up with Cocoa and Python (you can easily access the code inside the application package).

Some features:

- You can filter messages, reducing network overload (this is particularly useful when using a minimal TUIO setup, thus not needing the source tag, for instance).

- The interface keeps track of the network activity on both sides, and shows the number of Flash clients connected (either on main window or as a badge on the application icon on the Dock).

- The app updates itself automatically like many other famous apps (thanks to the Sparkle framework).

- You can choose whether to filter or not general OSC tags (by specifying them in the “OSC filtering” preference panel) and/or specific TUIO messages (by specifying them in the “TUIO filtering” preference panel).

- You can choose to start the bridge automatically at application launch (useful for automated installations where oscar could even be added to startup items), or start and stop the server manually.

Technically speaking, Oscar receives data from an UDP socket (which is the OSC/TUIO transmission protocol), translates it to XML-based messages that Flash can understand and forwards them via a TCP socket to all the Flash app clients connected (both on the local machine and/or on the network).

Software/hardware requirements

- Mac Os X 10.5 or later, on Intel or PowerPC processors (the application is Universal Binary).

To-do list

- Two-way communication (Flash-to-OSC).

Credits

This software uses the following external libraries:

+ Open SoundControl for Python, Copyright (C) 2002 Daniel Holth, Clinton McChesney, licensed under LGPL.

+ Twisted Module for Python (integrated into Mac Os X 10.5 Python Release).

This software is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2.

Lasercut party glasses

7 April 2009

“E se poi te ne penti?” (= and then, if you regret it?), a set of lasercut wooden glasses designed for a very important event: my birthday party! ;-)

Dr.Richie sweet wooden tears

Dr.Richie sweet wooden tears

Everybody loved them but the policemen… who weren’t moved by the beauty of the the lasercraft and shut down the party a little bit too soon… :(

Read the rest of this entry →

AAST 09 – computational architecture in Torino

3 April 2009

AAST 09

EDIT – some exhibition pictures from Bruce Sterling’s flickr

EDIT 2 – information about the lasercut modular cardboard installation (that was cut in our studio :-) here:

The friendly people at AAST (Lorena Alessio, Andrea Graziano, Davide Del Giudice) have planned an impressive series of events on computational architecture.

Here’s the info about the kickstart: Read the rest of this entry →