A Cone of Silence

City dwellers, rest easy. Engineers have designed a material that redirects sounds and could be used in buildings to shield them from noises. The sound-shielding material, which, if actually made, would be the first acoustic cloaking device, could also be useful in hiding military ships and other vessels from sonar.

Acoustic cloaking materials, which direct sound waves around an object so that they re-form on the other side with no distortion, do not exist in nature. But engineers led by José Sánchez-Dehesa at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, in Spain, have created a plan for making them, using alternating layers of two different materials. These materials would comprise arrays of sonic crystals–patterns of small rods made of aluminum or other materials that allow some sound waves to pass while blocking the passage of others.
MIT Technology Review

 

Sound shield: An acoustic cloak comprising alternating layers of sound-scattering materials should make objects invisible to sonar–and insulated from sound. In this computer-generated image, a cylinder (green circle) is coated with 200 layers of such a material, which was found to be the optimal design. Sound waves moving from left to right (their peaks and troughs are represented by red and blue lines) flow past the object and reform on the other side with no distortion.
Credit: New Journal of Physics

 

 

 

Radio with Feathers

Taiknam Hat is a kinetic head-wear that reacts and animates in accordance with the changes in its surrounding medium wave radio signals.

I’ve just finished reading Arthur C. Clarke’s When The World Was One, his personal history of communications, with a long section on the invention and development of radio. As a child a transistor radio was practically the only toy that I had. I lived in a remote part of Australia that took a long time to be connected to television. I wanted everything to be able to receive and transmit radio waves. This hat is the most beautiful radio I’ve ever seen.  And the most thoughtful. Perhaps my childhood wish came true, with dastardly results, for everything IS a radio (or a television or a computer or a microwave or an LED) causing something the hat’s designers refer to as “electrosmog”, which causes stress and anxiety to animals. The feathers on the hat measure the amount of electrosmog and shudder and sway according to the levels of electrosmog it detects. To be beautiful now is to be benign to the environment. It may include characteristics beyond the visual. To be beautiful while wearing this hat is to be still.

The intention of the project is to materialize the invisible and to contribute to the awareness of the increasing electromagnetic radiation. The co-existence of all electromagnetic waves that radiate from physical devices (light, microwaves, x-rays, and TV and radio transmissions) creates an invisible landscape that interacts with physical space and its inhabitants. It has long been noted that the expansion of uses for electrical, electronic and radio devices is converting this landscape into a new form of pollution which is known as electrosmog.

Medium waves are generated by radio transmitters which are ranked among the most powerful sources that cause electrosmog. Although the electrosmog is not visible to us, it is claimed to cause in biological effects on humans and animals and the topic has also been a focus for various projects in the field of art and design.

This project is an alternative attempt to materialize the immaterial space of radio waves by emulating horripilation, an automatic instinctive reaction of living creatures to sources of irritation and stress. Horripilation, which can be defined as the erection of hairs or feathers in various species under certain emotional conditions (better known as goose bumps in human body), is a temporary and local change in the skin and claimed to be evolved as a part of the “fight-or-flight” reaction by some biologists. Numerous experiments on various animals report that animals respond to exterior threats with a reflex of their nervous system which results in either the animal fighting (anger emotion) or fleeing (fear emotion) and horripilation can be clearly observed in the moment of both reactions. Other than the primary emotions of anger and fear, in some animals, especially in birds, horripilation is also attached to another instinct, the instinct of “self-display/signaling”.

Taiknam Hat aims to utilize the biological facts regarding the causes and properties of horripilation in birds as a metaphor, in order to express our bodies’ irritation towards electromagnetic radiation as well as to create a visual and tactile signage of their existence for other people. The final idea of creating a kinetic headwear which provides a contemporary interpretation of the historical feather hats is moreover encouraged by the scientific findings that show that feathers themselves may act as microwave sensors. Therefore, the headwear employs a number of actual feathers. The feathers hat are mounted on the Taiknam Hat become activated and move according to the existence and amount of medium waves at a certain location while the person who wears the hat strolls through space.

The system is composed of movable feathers movements of which are operated by a motor that is activated by a medium wave detection system. The detection system constantly checks and verifies whether there are any medium waves in the environment. This live information is sent to a microcomputer. The microcomputer activates the motor and the mechanical structure that is holding the feathers and results in the kinetic behaviour of the feathers.

The hat.
2 batteries 1,5v (should be changed when over).

Ricardo Nascimento,
Master Student, Kunstuniversität Linz, Interface Culture.
ricardo [at] popkalab.com

Ebru Kurbak
PhD Candidate, Department of Space and Design Strategies, Kunstuniversität Linz
ebru.kurbak [at] ufg.ac.at

Fabiana Shizue
freelancer illustrator. www.fshizue.com
fshizue [at] gmail.com

 

 

 

NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR EGGHEAD FREELANCE JOURNALISM

 

Doo.ri’s cocktail dress is made of abaca, a fabric that is derived from the leaf stalks of a banana species native to the Philippines, $1,395. At Barneys New York.

FutureFashion, an initiative pioneered by Earth Pledge and sponsored by Barneys New York and others, is bringing eco-conscious clothes to a well-heeled audience. For New York Fashion Week, Earth Pledge presented a group show featuring everything from casual day wear to ball gowns — all made with nature-friendly or secondhand fabrics. “Design and creativity don’t have to be sacrificed to make garments that are less harmful to the earth,” says Julie Gilhart, Barneys’ fashion director. “In fact, developing something sustainable can be a much more creative process.”

“Green With Envy.” The New York Times. April 27, 2008.

 

This article in the Style section of the New York Times magazine on Sunday made me see cartoon lightning bolts and stars before my eyes. I felt exactly as if all of the things that I’ve been working on for the last ten years had been pushed together and had gathered momentum until they rolled over the edge of a cliff and plummeted into the mainstream, landing with great impact. “…PVC, a chemically-produced plastic that doesn’t break down, perhaps isn’t the slickest of materials after all,” was part of the second sentence of the first paragraph. It was a small profile of Future Fashion, which has a database of 1,000 sustainable materials and a white paper on sustainability available for sale on its website. There was a goofy edge: the materials sounded as strange as the bits of nature that Alexis Rockman sent home from Tasmania to mix with painting materials to make his portraits of the local wildlife. Future Fashion recommends fabric made from the “…leaf stalks of a banana species native to the Phillipines“ and “… fur from the brush-tail possum, which is an animal that has become a scourge in Australia.”

Fifteen years ago I inadvertently fell out of the mainstream media orbit. I was working on book-length projects about robotics and design for small, hyper-specific foreign publishers and almost everything that I was translated into Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese and never published in English. And I began experimenting with bookbinding techniques inspired by the engineering and construction techniques of modern architecture. I dreamed of writing white papers and profiles of materials that would be as fascinating and full of character as Joseph Mitchell’s profiles of the people he encountered in New York in the 1930’s and 1940’s. But it was too early, my interests were still out on the nerd fringe then and I’m no crusader or pioneer. So while the media world has changed, probably irrecoverably, I can suddenly imagine writing white-paperish features and biographies of materials for the few high-profile global magazines I’m still connected to.