Commissioned by Jon Gibson for the i am 8 bit art show in LA, this is exactly what you think it is: a big, 15x scale, working Atari joystick! I had cabinetmaker Dan Fill help me with the cutting of the big pieces and some of the assembly, and the electronics are really embarassingly crude. […]
Archive for July, 2011
Giant Atari Joystick!
July 5, 2011
Ulak-Tartysh!
July 5, 2011
Ulak-Tartysh, also known as Buzakshi, is a sport played in Kyrgyzstan that is best described as polo, but instead of a ball, a decapitated goat carcass. It’s also the name and subject of an arcade game I made, and passed off as genuine as part of a hoax. It was made for the i am […]
Collaboration with Kerry Tribe: Dead Star Light
July 5, 2011
I worked with the amazing artist Kerry Tribe on two pieces for her solo show at the Arnolfini museum in Bristol, UK. We developed the concept and executed both projects together, Milton Torres Sees a Ghost and The Last Soviet. For Milton Torres Sees a Ghost we designed a system using two reel-to-reel decks and […]
The Death of Analog TV: A Talk at Machine Project
July 4, 2011
I’ve done a number of things with Machine Project; this one was a talk I gave on the last day of analog TV programming in the US; I did my talk about the precursor to that, the wonderfully bizzarre mechanical television. Here’s a video: Jason talks about Mechanical TV on the Last Day of […]
Books!
July 4, 2011
Here’s a bunch of book-related stuff, all crammed together: First off, my book I wrote with Carrie McLaren, Ad Nauseam. I co-edited, wrote parts, did the illustrations, and the cover. If you get one consumer’s guide to American consumer culture, make it this one. For Sean Carroll’s excellent From Eternity to Here, I did […]
Make:Way Race Team, 24 Hours of Lemons
July 3, 2011
Incredibly, the nice folks over at Make: magazine sponsored me and a crack team in fielding a sub $500 racecar in the great 24 Hours of Lemons, the world’s finest motorsport for crapboxes costing under $500. We did far better than anyone thought we had any right to. It was a blast.
A Machine Project Field Guide to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
July 3, 2011
I was lucky enough to participate in Machine Project‘s takeover of LACMA. I had two pieces: the Hydropticonium (pictured above, click the image for an iffy papercraft version you can make), a zoetrope powered by the LACMA’s fountains, and the Peeping Netsuke (pictured below) which was an apparatus that made a giant netsuke peep in a […]
Nerdcore Calendar Robot Gun-Arm
July 3, 2011
Another Jon Gibson commission, I made the cybernetic dyna-invigorator imparalator arm prosthetic worn by the lovely model here. This was for the 2008 Nerdcore calendar.
Robots!
July 3, 2011
I’ve been building a bunch of robots lately, too. They light up, move, or worry. Some even loiter, wait, or consider things. One can see into the future, but I wasn’t able to make any way of usable output.