The sheep market

The sheep market is an online project featuring 10,000 sheep created by workers on Amazon´s Mechanical Turk. Each worker was paid 0,2 $ to draw a sheep facing left.

What a marvelous idea. And the created sheep are adorable, funny and occasionally really really strange. I´m kind of fatalistically interested in how the rejected sheep (662) looked like. I think it shows in a really wonderful way the individuality of people and how they look at the world – or at sheep.
I could spend hours there watching the individual sheep being drawn.

Oh, and you can buy your very own sheep right out of the herd too.

Funky forest

Funky Forest is an interactive installation made by interactive artist and designer Theodore Watson and motiongraphic artist Emily Gobeille.

It “is a wild and crazy ecosystem where you manage the resources to influence the environment around you. Streams of water flowing on the floor can be diverted to make the different parts of the forest grow. If a tree does not receive enough water it withers away but by pressing your body into the forest you create new trees based on your shape and character. As you explore and play you discover that your environment is inhabited by sonic life forms who depend on a thriving ecosystem to survive.”

The trees and creatures in the installation look really beautiful; just abstract enough to make it look like a strange magical forest, but the processes of our real ecosystems are still recognisable. A really wonderful project.
And it sure looks like a lot of fun!

There is a fun video on youTube and on Theodore Watsons website (youTube might load faster 😉 ).

Universcale

This is a very interesting project i have come across a while ago. Nikon´s Universcale attempts (sucessfully) to visualize the concept of size though an interactive animation (for lack of a better word).
I really like the design of the site; they used only the silhouettes of their examples to give it a clean look and really, that´s all you need for the purpose. There are hundreds examples (all with an explaining subtext) from objects smaller than atoms to the extremities of space.

It makes you feel small at one time and like a giant in the next and you begin to comprehend how fascinating our world is, even (escpecially) if you look at only the one aspect of size. Try it out!

Worldbench

Ok, Inga!Let the fun begin!!!And i´m starting with……

Worldbench an interactive installation by Greyworld form the year 2005. Greyworld is an artist collective based in London, and their main interest lies in urban spaces and interactivity. Worldbench unites places around the world. The individual benches are set up against a wall on which the “mirror image” of another bench is projected. This allows the people using them to interact with their counterparts just as if their were sitting on the same bench. I love that the simple idea of talking on a park bench is used to bring people around the world closer together. Its very non-threatening and nobody wants to teach you something.