Tag Archives: Art

For The Maker In All Of Us

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As kids, we all loved playing with Play-Doh. We could let our imaginations run wild to build, mold, cut, flatten and create anything, yes anything. Well, thanks to the people at inventables, a technology company based in Chicago, you can now make those childhood dreams a reality. Inventables has developed the perfect technology, Carvey, a successfully funded Kickstarter project expected to be in full production by Fall 2015.

 Carvey is quiet, clean, easy to use and can carve your project in 3 simple steps.

  1. Make your design with the integrated softwaresoft
  2. Choose your material (wood, plastic, foam, wax, cork soft metal, etc,)
  3. Click “Carve” and let the machine do the work until it achieves your desired form

Here is a list of items you can easily make with Carvey: jewelry, wooden sunglasses, street signs, can openers, etc. Fell free to watch the video of Carvey in action here.

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What Sparks Our Fire: A 3D machine that is easy to use and can help us turn ideas into real objects in under 5 mins.

What would you make with Carvey?

Rediscover The Joy Of Smartphone Photography

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With Foldable Studio aka Foldio you can become a pro photographer no matter where you are without having to rent a professional lighting sets. Foldio is an intuitive light box for photographers of all  levels, made possible by OrangeMonkie of South Korea and Los Angeles. The project was Kickstarter funded and received nearly 20 times its goal!

In a nutshell, Foldio is a one-of-a-kind mini photo studio for smartphones that allows anyone to take high quality pictures with a smartphone, anywhere, quickly, easily and at anytime. It eliminates issues of bad lighting, shadows, and gives you a seamless background. The perfect box for snapping awesome photos of your food, crafts, and much more, especially if you are going to sell online.

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Foldio comes with a white wall and 1 or 2  built-in LED lights to give you just the right amount of light under any condition. The box unfolds to a 10.2” and works with a 9 Volt battery. When you are done, it folds like an envelope and can be easily stored into your backpack or a briefcase. Foldio comes with different color washable backdrops: black, white, and gray for impeccable pics. What is fun is you can even make your own backdrops with any paper or fabric.

What Sparks Our Fire: A portable tool allows us to share our creativity on-the-go.

Are you ready to rediscover the joy of smartphone photography with Foldio?

Are We Planning Our Future Memories?

Cameras are powerful tools to control the memories we make. In a 2010 TED Talk, psychologist and Nobel Prize winner professor Daniel Kahneman, presented the idea that millennials see the present as an “anticipated memory.” In other words, when a person takes an Instagram picture, that person is both experiencing the present reality and actively shaping how that reality will be remembered in the future. As a result, many will argue they are betraying the present by not living in the moment. But, are the memories the real motive why the ‘Instagram generation’ is so addicted to capturing the moment?

Internet surveys indicate over 80% of social media posts to sites like Instagram, Twitter and others amount to “announcements about one’s own immediate experiences”. We post pictures of what we eat, drink, where we’ve been and calmly await for the next tsunami of likes. But what is it that makes us post those pictures on Instagram? Can’t we keep those for our private use? It is undeniable we like the attention but, why do we like the attention so much?

In 2012, Harvard University National Academy of Sciences conducted a study to assess how much people liked talking about themselves and why. The results is that Humans get a biochemical buzz from self-disclosure. We devote almost 40% of conversation sharing our own experience. Sharing personal information activates the reward areas of the brain. The same as we experience after sex, food or getting money. Talking about other people in contrast does not activate the rewarding part of the brain. What is most interesting is the findings also revealed people actually love self-disclosure if they knew people were listening. All of this goes along way toward explaining the appeal of self-promoting social-media platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

What Sparks Our Fire: The power of self-disclosure on social media through pictures.

Do you agree with Daniel Kahneman’s statement or do you think this entire generation is sharing Instagram pictures with the ultimate goal of a social validation? We would like to hear your thoughts.

Write On

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While reminiscing about your childhood I’m sure you have fond memories of digging through the biggest Crayola box to find that perfect color. Now, as an adult, you may not be digging through that same crayon box, but if you’re a designer we’re sure you wish you could.

Scribble is the pen that changes how we interact with color. All you do is hold the back of the pen up to a surface and the pen will scan and reproduce the color within seconds. Most graphic designers would love this capability to be digital in order to replicate the color onto their computer rather than paper. No problem, there is a scribble stylus that functions the same way to easily translate the colors from the world around you, digitally. This pen makes designing and recreating colors easy. The scribble also has an associated app where you can find colors you previously scanned to use again, or share with others.

The Scribble recently started funding on Kickstarter, so if you’re ready to bring some more color into your life, go ahead and contribute.

What Sparks our Fire: A great design tool that is fun and easy to use.

What’s your favorite color?

The End of the World as We Know It

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In the vision of the future held by artist Evan Holm, ‘there will be a time when all tracings of human culture will dissolve back into the soil under the slow crush of the unfolding universe’.  In essence, he believes all traces of human culture and creation will slowly be worn away and covered by dust of the future.

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In order to express this slow, inexorable decline and burial, Holm created a technological masterpiece, a record player submerged beneath the surface of a still pool that produces near-flawless playback. Laid in the center of an installation combining natural and man-made elements, Holm has given form to his darker thoughts, as the video below demonstrates.

What Sparks Our Fire: Artistic and technological creativity used to express the submersion of all human creation beneath the waves of time.

What do you interpret from this installation?