A couple of weeks ago at HacDC Dave Monachello, an electronic artist and frequenter of the infamous gather known as Burning Man presented one of his latest works, an animated electroluminescent wire sculpture depicting Martin Luther King, Jr. Multiple layers of EL wire were attached to a translucent backing material depicting parts of different facial expressions associated with the act of speaking. The EL wire was rigged up to a bank of microcontrollers which triggered the different layers as a frame animation in time with a recording of King's I Have A Dream speech.
This is one of the neatest art hacks I've seen in a while. Let me explain:
Books are ultimately tools for storing information in a non-volatile manner for ease of transportation and reference. They're a relatively low bandwidth medium, limited by how fast the reader can turn the pages and the rate at which the visual cortex processes the characters, but are remarkably stable. Diskettes, on the other hand, are a more informationally dense storage medium, weigh less, and take up less space. They are more vulnerable to mistreatment, however: A fingerprint in the wrong place can wipe out large …
