The Head

Featuring art and composition by Matias Vigliano, and a bouncy musical backing by Ariel Gandolfo, this hand-drawn animation is simply amazing.

Microscopic Art Hides Inside Computer Chips

Who is Moose Boy? From the Motorola RF IC Nokia 5190 handset

Considering the expense, precision and difficulty of manufacturing computer chips, you would think the engineers designing them are pretty serious people.

But it’s not all business inside a chip fab, as these microscope photos reveal. In fact, the designers of microchips frequently hide tiny cartoons, drawings and even messages alongside the super-tiny circuits and semiconductors they create.

Chipworks, a company that analyzes microchips by peeling them apart and looking at them under microscopes, has discovered many examples of silicon art. We’ve selected a few highlights here from the firm’s extensive galleries of silicon art, but check the Chipworks website for more.

The images in this gallery are magnified 200 to 500 times.

As Chipworks explains, these drawings are made with the same processes used to assemble the rest of a computer chip. Designs are etched onto photolithography plates which are then used to “print” the chips’ circuitry, layer by layer, in thin films of silicon, silicon dioxide, aluminum and other materials. It’s a complicated process that takes hundreds of steps and millions of dollars worth of machinery, and it requires incredible degrees of precision and repeatability.

But if there’s a little unused space in a chip, why not fill that with an entertaining design? It’s not as if most of the chip companies’ customers will ever notice. The only people likely to see these designs are the chip engineers’ supervisors and analysts at companies like Chipworks.

“The mass production of these works of art as parasites on the body of a commercial IC goes unnoticed by most observers,” writes Chipworks. “Their existence is a tribute to human resourcefulness and creativity, surfacing from deep within a complex process.”

By Dylan Tweney WIRED MAGAZINE

It is what it is . .

"birds" (pleix) from pleix on Vimeo.

If you have never seen this video before, your day has been made, your mind has been blown, etc., etc., etc. into infinity.

Crop Tops: Strange Agricultural Landscapes Seen From Space

Agriculture is one of the oldest and most pervasive human impacts on the planet. Estimates of the land surface affected worldwide range up to 50 percent. But while driving through the seemingly endless monotony of wheat fields in Kansas may give you some insight into the magnitude of the change to the landscape, it doesn't compare to the view from above.

When seen from space, those same featureless wheat fields are transformed into a strange and beautiful pattern.

By Betsy Mason March 17, 2011 | 7:00 am | Categories: Earth Science WIRED

Grizzly Bear - Knife

Knife from Encyclopedia Pictura on Vimeo.

Gabriel Dawe

Gabriel Dawe was born in Mexico City where he grew up surrounded by the intensity and color of Mexican culture. After working as a graphic designer, he moved to Montreal, Canada in 2000 following a desire to explore foreign land. In search for creative freedom he started experimenting and creating artwork, which eventually led him to explore textiles and embroidery—activities traditionally associated with women and which were forbidden for a boy growing up in Mexico. Because of this, his work is subversive of notions of masculinity and machismo that are so ingrained in his culture. By working with thread and textiles, Dawe’s work has evolved into creating large-scale installations with thread, creating environments that deal with notions of social constructions and their relation to evolutionary theory and the self-organizing force of nature.

—Carl Platon, Nov 23 2010.

House and Universe

Images: Miriam Aust

Product design, furniture and exhibition architecture.
Wilhelmshöher - Allee 121
34121 Kassel
Germany

From House and Universe

A Brief History of Title Design

A Brief History of Title Design from Ian Albinson on Vimeo.

A Brief History of Title Design from Ian Albinson on Vimeo.

Nuclear reactor wall charts

Image: Wylfa Magnox, Wylfa, Anglesey, UK. Wall chart insert, Nuclear Engineering, 1965

Now seems like a good week to revisit this set of 105 reactor wall charts, uploaded by the University of New Mexico. The dates next to each chart relate to the issue of Nuclear Engineering International magazine in which they first appeared. Ronald Knief, a nuclear engineer from Sandia National Laboratories, assembled the image collection.

More about the images, and links to the complete set, here at Bibliodyssey. Here's the direct Flickr set link.

(via BB Submitterator, thanks cinemajay)

Daphne Oram's audiovisual music synthesizer, 1957

Oramics from Nick Street on Vimeo.

Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was the co-founder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a sound effects and music studio established in the 1950s that had a vast influence on electronic music and synthesizer technology. At the BBC and after, Oram developed an incredible new kind of sound synthesis technology, called Oramics. The video above offers a glimpse of her Oramics synthesizer, purchased from a collector in 2009 and now under restoration at the Science Museum in London. From DaphneOram.org:

Jim O'Raw

Jim O’Raw’s silkscreened prints are a result of his fascination of cmyk printing techniques and the endless color manipulation and the experimental accidents and imperfections that bring the work to life.

The Jelly Wobbler

The Jelly Wobbler by Nik Ramage is a machine for … wobbling jelly.

Fragments of RGB

fragments of RGB - 02 from onformative on Vimeo.

Fragments of RGB is an interactive installation by onformative. The classic LED screen as a medium was simulated and disintegrated by the creation of a pixel-like LED optic with the ability to change and transform with the viewer’s movement and, hence, his perspective and point of view.

Bern Macon Summer Matte EPS Helmet

The Stackhat for a new generation.

»Metal Urbain«, 2010 by Jim Lambie.

Jim Lambie at the Modern Institute in Glasgow

»X2MX«

»X2MX«, 2009 by Matteo Giordano.

Daniel Carlsten

Tim Sanders

Microscopic photographs of two full rotations of the grooves within three different genres of vinyl records. The grooves have been increased in scale from their original scale by 100. This allows the viewer to see and understand how audio is translated when pressed into a vinyl record. The patterns of grooves are explained and compared between genres of music.

Volcanados?

These volcanic water spouts spun off Kilauea volcano's eruption cloud during a 2008 blast. More than just a pillar of smoke, eruption clouds are, themselves, cyclonic, spinning around a vertical axis and mimicking some behavior patterns usually seen in storm cells, including the ability to give birth to smaller cyclones, water spouts and dust devils.

This photo was taken by Stephen & Donna O'Meara and is part of the Extreme Exposures exhibit running at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, starting October 23.

Via Bad Astronomy

No Panda