robot clothes

^{LED throwies in the streets of NYC}

James Powderly is currently a Research & Development fellow at Eyebeam in Chelsea, NYC – a fantastic gallery-space-like residency program for art-geeks that work in new media, "etc". On a more personal note, when we were grad students, James was a huge friend and resource in helping to set up my first-ever group exhibition (Johnson Museum, upstate New York); he "gave" me the term Compressionism – something he came up with for a series of his own interactive videos about five years ago, but is letting me have for my prints right now; and he videotaped my and Nicole’s wedding (tho I still have not edited that) – just to name a few niceties. So yes, I am biased, but he was also a director at Honeybee Robotics for a number of years, so we know he is ‘wicked smaht.’ One of his many current goings-on:

Robot Clothes is an art and commercial research and development partnership, specializing in robotic systems, interaction design and product prototyping. This partnership, formed in 2002 by Michelle Kempner and James Powderly, utilizes a hybrid fine art and commercial design and engineering approach to support innovative science and technology development efforts for clients including fortune 100 companies, NASA and internationally renowned artists, such as Diller + Scofidio and Miranda July. In addition to contracted research and development efforts, Robot Clothes internally supports fine art projects ranging from a robotic public sculpture for Central Park to an animatronic opera about Crohn’s Disease.

Dude.

Also, James’ Eyebeam crew recently teamed up with the Graffiti Research Lab to produce the above Electro-Graf – a "graffiti piece or throw-up that uses conductive and magnetic paint to embed LED display electronics." Check out the link for an awesome ‘LED Throwies’ video – hit the streets, throw little trinkets at the walls that stick and light up, and so ‘write’ with live LEDs on the sides of buildings!