Thirsty is a waterbottle that encourages you to drink lots of water! It’ll buzz when you drink too many opaque liquids, and does a little happy dance if you drink your water regularly.

Video and documentation to follow.

Play a game of truth or dare with the cocktail waitress and the dress will mix you a drink. Anouk Wipprecht’s work is mostly really good, and I’d also encourage people to check out “Intimacy 2.0” as well, which I consider her best work. anti-utopias.com/art/anouk-wipprecht-daredroid-2-0/

Technological Dream Series: No. 1, Robots from dunne & raby on Vimeo.

A reimagining of what the robot could be. Very ethereal design fiction.

Heavy Breather

“Accessories for Lonely Men is a collection of eight fictional products designed to alleviate loneliness after the departure or loss of a woman. The objects propose that most forms of human intimacy are crude enough in their physicality that they can be replicated with electronic objects, and are meant to question what we think we miss in a relationship; the individual or the generic traces they leave behind.”

noamtoran.com/NT2009/projects/accessories-for-lonely-men

What good is the internet if you can’t hug a chicken through it?

Not art, but really interesting technology. Projection onto a special fabric surface that live feeds a camera from behind you.

Think Tank is about reflection.  It strips down sensation and provides a carefully curated set of aural and visual stimuli.  The ultimate goal is for participants to leave their current emotional and physical states and experience emotions based on priming words. We used several emotions from John Koenig’s project The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

For example, énoument:

n. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, where you can finally get the answers to how things turn out in the real world—who your baby sister would become, what your friends would end up doing, where your choices would lead you, exactly when you’d lose the people you took for granted—which is priceless intel that you instinctively want to share with anybody who hadn’t already made the journey, as if there was some part of you who had volunteered to stay behind, who was still stationed at a forgotten outpost somewhere in the past, still eagerly awaiting news from the front.

In the video above, we present Think Tank as a form of design fiction – in which global culture has done away with most sentiment. However, black market emotion tanks like ours still exist on the fringes of society, letting people experience complex emotions long forgotten by most.

Photo of the original 1970 installation

The Sound of Ice Melting is a conceptual installation piece that Kos likened to an audio/visual version of the Zen koan “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” I like this piece mostly for the simple materials and the way it forces you to pay attention to something small that generally goes unnoticed. It was the inspiration for a piece I did last year where I made headphones out of ice.

Sortie en Mer is an interactive drowning simulator by CLM BBDO.  In it, you  see through the eyes of Julien, whose clumsy friend knocks him into the water while out sailing. From there, Sortie en Mer is a haunting and frantic struggle for survival.  It’s an incredibly intense experience for something that takes place through the web browser, and while it is very PSA-y, it’s pretty effective at putting you into the shoes of a drowning sailor.