Hip.Young.Thing.

I was lucky enough to be able to go and visit the Telectroscope in London bridge last night and I can attest first hand that it is a wonderful piece of interactive public art. The Telectroscope is the brain child of Victorian engineer Alexander Stanhope St George who envisaged a secret tunnel running underneath the Atlantic connecting London with New York.

These plans were re-discovered by Alexander’s great grandson Paul St George a few years ago and with the miracle of modern technology his vision has finally been achieved. The apparatus itself looks like a huge steampunk-esque telescope buried in the ground and allows viewers to communicate in real-time between London and New York via a large screen and webcam.

The exhibition is on in both London (London Bridge) and New York (Brooklyn Bridge) until June 15th, so if you’re in either city I definitely recommend going to check it out.

Photograph by Mathew Andrews

Following on with what seems to be the theme of the moment, interactive displays and interiors, I present to you the work of Nikolai Cornell AKA madein.la who has some brilliant interactive kiosks, exhibitions, wall panels and pretty much anything else that has a screen!

Trafik are a French design firm who have some great looking visual / interactive interiors in their portfolio. I was wondering who I was reminded of when visiting the site when I realised it does look very similar to UK based United Visual Artists. Anyway, regardless of that I suggest checking them out for some interesting ways of combining design and technology with interior spaces.

Meso digital design agency are on a whole other level. Their digital interiors are both amazing and awe inspiring. Shown above is an image from Cyberhelvetia where a digital swimming pool was installed to simulate bathing. You really have to see it to understand, but the results are mind blowing.

The HoloCube is a fully integrated 3D platform that makes your product look like never before. Well, that’s what they say on the site anyway. It’s basically a hollow cube that has an image projected inside it. I’m not quite sure what to make of this, the concept is really cool, however in this instance it looks like the physical product falls short of making a huge impact (perhaps this is due to the holograms not actually looking like they are real 3D on the website).

Regardless, it’s cool to see that this kind of technology is making in-roads into the commercial market. It’s just one step closer to the 3D shark from Back to the Future.

Remeber cassette tapes? If you’re a child of the 70’s or 80’s then you definitely will, children of the 90’s perhaps not so much. Anyway, Tapedeck.org has a great collection of images of old cassette tapes and you can even sort by brand, playing time and quality (I always liked BASF tapes myself).

Mark Coleran has a brilliant showreel of his visualisations of computer interfaces in movies. This is some serious science-fiction, although it’s interesting to see some of these concepts coming to fruition with ground-breaking technologies like surface.

A virus for macs?!? Luckily for you apple owners the Newton Virus won’t harm any files on the machine. Instead, at a random time the desktop will fall apart in a spectacular fashion. Developed by those fun loving pranksters at Troika who are also responsible for the magnificent Cloud scupture at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, the Newton Virus is sure to freak out anyone who has it installed. Now, where can I download a copy…

Chris O’Shea is a talented artist/designer who creates some amazing interactive work. Shown above is a piece called “echoChamber” which is a 3D navigable soundscape.

These maps of the internet by Chris Harrison are mesmerising. In a time when communication is at it’s easiest and most convenient it’s easy to forget about the underlying infrastructure that connects us all. These visualisations provide a sense of scale to the faceless networks that surround us in modern life.