Cybraphon - bloody genius "autonomous emotional robot band" thing
It's so good, I hope this lives forever. Just to explain what this mad device is - it's the Cybraphon - a sort of band-in-a-box, patterned after 19th Century mechanical bands, which responds to what people say about it on the internet. The happier it gets, the more happy the music it plays, and vice versa.
I hope it inspires other artists to play around with what I'm guessing it's based on, which is the Arduino - an "open-source electronics prototyping platform" - essentially a circuitboard you plug into your computer over USB, with digital outs and analogue ins, meaning that you can attach all kinds of sensors and output devices.
I've got a couple of these from when I was intending to build a 128 sized Arduinome - and I will get round to it eventually, honest. I got one
of them out the other day and managed to make a couple of LEDs attached to the digital outs flash on and off, such geeky fun.
I should say that the Cybraphon is by the Edinburgh-based art collective FOUND and you can see it at the Inspace Gallery (Google Map link) as part of the Edinburgh Arts Festival, until 5th September 2009.
