Tools Hack Daily

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Native Art Market

The Native Art Market will be hosting over 30 Native American artists this weekend in NYC and Washington DC.

Art by award-winning and innovative Indigenous artists from the Western Hemisphere is featured in the museum’s annual Native Art Market. Items for sale include both traditional and contemporary beadwork, jewelry, paintings, photography, pottery, and sculpture.

Check it out!

Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Sarah Meyohas’s Tech-Art Explores the Mechanics of Perception #ArtTuesday

Sarah Meyohas is an artist who works with tech. Her work as ranged from film, photography, virtual reality, performance art and sculpture. Last spring she presented an exhibit at Marianne Boesky, in New York. Nice profile from W Magazine:

Her latest body of work has less conceptual sleight-of-hand but even more technical wizardry. For the show at Marianne Boesky, she created sculptures out of holograms and diffraction gratings. (The latter is a device used to manipulate light that is often employed in spectroscopy and telecommunications.) Meyohas—whose red bob and wide-set eyes make her resemble a Millennial Shirley Temple—spent months trying to convince the grating manufacturer to work with an artist. “I had to show them I was willing to pay,” she explains. “They don’t want their time to be wasted.”

Pulped Fiction: The Da Vinci Code Transformed into 1984

If you’ve read The Da Vinci Code, you know that it’s a very fast read. We have a friend who picked up Dan Brown’s bestseller in a bookshop, opened to the first page, went into a fugue state, and came back to consciousness a few hours later having finished the book, almost against their will. During those strange and dark times when the book first came out, many otherwise discerning readers had similar experiences — so many people, in fact, that the world is still overrun with copies of The Da Vinci Code, decades after its first release. Now artists David Shrigley has a solution to this disturbing phenomenon. Here’s more from JUXTAPOZ:

The story goes that Shrigley’s studio worked with a specialist papermill, book designer and screenprinters to upcycle and repurpose the books into a release of 1,000 copies of Nineteen Eighty- Four, which came out of copyright in 2021. Each book in the edition has been signed and numbered by David Shrigley and comes with a signed and numbered screen-print. Fragments of the original novels remain on the paper, with letters and sometimes whole words of Robert Langdon’s adventures appearing on the pages. The typeface was carefully chosen to mirror the type used for The Da Vinci Code’s first edition, while the book’s cover has been repurposed from the card backing and dustjackets of more than 1,250 copies of the hardback special edition.

“I am fascinated by the power of books to rewrite our culture, something that Dan Brown and George Orwell have each addressed in their wildly successful works,” Shrigley said in a statement. “Pulped Fiction should not be seen as a commentary on either writer, but as one artist’s effort to rescue a mountain of unwanted paperbacks and turn them into something new.”

See more!

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Someone Had to Build the Giant Mushrooms for the Candy Forest

Thanksgiving Day is upon us, and with it the long-running Macy’s Day Parade (The parade began in 1924, making this year its 99th!). The parade has always been a spectacle; at times magical, at times cinematic, at times misfortunate (see balloon mishaps, via CNN), but always iconic. I grew up, like many, both watching the parade on television and sometimes live. One really special year my Dad booked a hotel room and took my siblings and I to watch the balloons and give my mom some room to prepare for Thanksgiving. I never realized what a smart move this was until now, especially since there were four of us ages 1-7 at the time.

Anyway, the parade’s spectacle has always been front and center that sometimes it’s hard to remember the level of artistry involved as well. New York Magazine’s Curbed recently wrote about Macy’s Studio and the makers and artists who bring the parade to life, 1 fake cherry at a time.

In the era of Amazon and Alibaba, a surprising amount of what you see at the parade is made from scratch; Carnivale told me that she tried to purchase fake cherries for the tree on the Timothee Chalamet–fronted Wonka-themed float she’s working on but couldn’t find any that were big enough to be seen by gathered crowds on Sixth Avenue, 28 million viewers at home, and Hoda and Savannah dancing in a little booth. She made 80 of them at a rate of about five per day.

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Eric Joyner’s Pop Surrealism #ArtTuesday

Folks have their favorite robots, of course. Some lean toward R2-D2, some really dig the T-1000, some like cuddly little WALL-E, and some grey-haired obscurantists will talk your ear off about V.I.N.CENT. from The Black Hole. But a everyone, we hope, has a soft spot in their heart for Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, the classic CinemaScope science fiction riff on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. But only the pop surrealism master Eric Joyner would think of painting Robby playing the blues on an electric guitar. Here’s more from Sci-Fi-O-Rama:

First I get a kernel of an idea, then think about it, expand upon it… consider all the possibilities. I may do some sketches, depending on how lost I am. Then I do research on the subject I want to paint. Next, I may photograph some of my toy robots. Then on the computer I will combine the sketches, research and photos into a composition. Then after transferring the image to the canvas, I spray it with fixative. Next is a thin wash of oil paint (1/2 thinner, 1/2 Galkyd); a brown or grey color. After that drys I work from dark to light, background to foreground, thin to thick and fuzzy to sharp. I mix regular oil paints with alkyds, so the paint drys faster. After a couple weeks I can varnish it, usually spray varnish.

See more!

HackSpace Magazine Issue 72 – Tiny Code Reader from Useful Sensors @HackSpaceMag @Raspberry_Pi

HackSpace Magazine Issue 72 compares the Tiny Code Reader from Useful Sensors with the Zero Barcode HAT. About the Tiny Code Reader:

This is the product that inspired the entire roundup. The Tiny Code Reader from Useful Sensors is available at Adafruit. It has an RP2040 on the back and a camera module on the front. It allows you to quickly scan a QR code and feed the data into a microcontroller or single board
computer. And it’s really inexpensive! Just $7!

The on-board microcontroller runs TensorFlow Lite and does some complicated image recognition to decode the QR code. Simply connect it to your microcontroller via the STEMMA QT / Qwiic connector or wire it up the old-fashioned way. It’s amazing to think about this $7 technology compared to what was available ten years ago. We are in the future!

HackSpace Magazine awards the Tiny Code Reader a 10/10, saying “Amazing tech at an amazing price.”

HackSpace Magazine Issue 72- Making Music on Pico #CircuitPython @HackSpaceMag @Raspberry_Pi

HackSpace Magazine Issue 72 writes about making music on a Raspberry Pi Pico:

Most microcontroller programming environments have a way of making beeps, and even if there’s not an in-built method, it’s a pretty simple thing to do – just flick a pin on and off quickly (but not too quickly) and you have an audio signal that you can send to a speaker, headphones, or other audio devices.

CircuitPython, however, has just gained a complex audio synthesis module called synthio. This lets you not just create beeps and boops, but control these sounds in a variety of ways.

We’ve only really scratched the surface of what you can do with synthio here. It’s a hugely powerful system for creating music using microcontrollers. There’s a more in-depth introduction online at hsmag.cc/synthiofundamentals.