Personas is an art installation by Aaron Zinman that is a component of Metropath(ologies), an interactive exhibit by the Sociable Media Group, MIT Media Lab… It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person — to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

When Charlie Kratzer started on the basement art project in his south Lexington home, he was surrounded by walls painted a classic cream. Ten dollars of Magic Marker and Sharpie later, the place was black and cream and drawn all over.

Have a look at this amazing work:

Here is some of the development & production work I did on UP (2005-2008). Similar to the work from The Incredibles, (production paintings, color/lighting design and artistic direction) this was done to help inspire the look of the film… A challenge in film is conveying how something feels, not how it exists in reality. Research trips can be a blessing and a curse: the blessing in that visiting an actual place surpasses what you can get from video and photos alone, the curse in being too much a slave to the actual place. Imagination and feeling should dictate everything, not reality.

(Thanks Waxy!)

Beautiful:

There is one remarkable thing about randomness: Its existence is neither proved nor disproved it even appears everyday in science and in our everyday lives. Random walk is interesting for people who want to know more about the mystic character of this invisible companion.

RANDOM WALK… presents experiments in mathematics and physics, showing the mysterious interaction of chaos and order in randomness. The project RANDOM WALK simulates randomness in visualizations, which are easy to understand. In this way, it delivers insight into a phenomenon, which has so far remained unexplained.

I love it all except the 2nd part of #5.

Dave is the founder and president of XPLANE:

I’m a project guy. As an artist, entrepreneur, educator and amateur philosopher, I always have a number of projects going, both personal and professional. Sometimes they go somewhere, sometimes I get bored and abandon them. One of the beauties of the internet is that even abandoned projects continue to exist and can be picked up or reenergized at any moment. Here’s the definitive list of projects that I am working on or have worked on in the past (A work in progress). The list is alphabetical because I don’t work on these projects in any kind of linear way. They are like a busy kitchen: there is always something simmering, something boiling, something set aside to cool for awhile, something in the deep freeze, and something being served. In fact I am still working on this list. If you see something with no explanation it’s because I haven’t finished writing the description yet :)

The guilloches are vintage design elements that were frequently used for anti-counterfeiting security purposes on banknotes, passports, checks and certificates during the past two hundred years. As the times changed and digital copy and printing technologies perfected, guilloches no longer presented sufficient security measures that could prevent forging and counterfeiting of valuable papers. Today the main part of security technology lies in the special paper or tricky inks the designs are printed upon or with.” (Thanks Chris Glass!)

Realizing that printing technology has left printed work without the texture, soul, or the spirit of vintage printing, Mister Retro created Permanent Press!

Take any design, photograph, type treatment, or image and transport to another time and aesthetic with our powerful and easy-to-use plug-in GUI interface. We spent thousands of hours developing this one of a kind plug-in sure to bring your work to the next level.”