art

Tal Avitzur is obsessed with collecting what he calls "retro junk." The California artist spends hours sifting through scrapyards to find parts for the whimsical robots he dreams up.

At his Talbotics studio in Santa Barbara, Avitzur has created dozens of bots that are creepy, cute, alien, or just plain bizarre. Many are more than just ornamental -- they work as night lights, illuminating dark rooms with their otherworldly LED eyes.

Some of his "Talbots" feature unexpected parts like vacuum cleaner motor housings, dolls, winches, clutches, floor polishers, meat grinder blades, taxidermy animal eyes, and old boat fittings. … Read more

Many people would probably say their handwriting has suffered the more they use computers to communicate. But imagine trying to exercise your rusty penmanship on letters that have not 1 or 2 strokes but 5, 10, 15, or more.

The Japanese often complain that sending e-mails and texts erodes their skills in writing the thousands of kanji, or Chinese characters, they learn in school. Some are maddeningly complex and, if rarely used, easy to forget.

But brush-painting kanji calligraphy is also a centuries-old art form. Keio University engineering professor Seiichiro Katsura has a way to help preserve it with his Motion Copy System robot. … Read more

Like any parent, I prize the Picasso-caliber works of art my kids create at school and around the house.

Alas, I don't own a warehouse, so I simply don't have room to store all these masterpieces. What am I supposed to do, throw them in the trash? The guilt! The guilt!

Now there's an app for that: Art My Kid Made. (It's available now for iOS and soon for Android.) With it you can take photos of various crafts and drawings to preserve for posterity, and share them via Evernote, Facebook, or Twitter.

The app is … Read more

Electronic Arts' latest tool to keep The Simpsons: Tapped Out iOS game from becoming a zombie app: actual zombies.

In anticipation of The Simpsons' annual Treehouse of Horror episode, EA updated its Farmville-like game to include Halloween-themed landscapes such as a cemetery, complete with zombies and zombie pets that can infect the characters in your game. The addition adds a new wrinkle to the game, and breathes new life in for players who were done buying buildings and likely on the verge of burning out.

With the upgrade, EA made good on its promise to continue supporting The Simpsons: Tapped … Read more

One artist sees treasure in trashed keyboards of yesteryear.

Inspired by the tale of ancient Greece's infamously sneaky Trojan Horse and humankind's Internet gluttony, German artist Babis Pangiotidis created an elaborate model of a rocking horse known as "Hedonism(y) Trojaner" with skin made of thousands of forgotten keyboard keys. Babis states on his portfolio site that the shades of color found on the recycled keys range from ivory white to nicotine-stained yellow. … Read more

The International Symposium on Electronic Art came to New Mexico for 2012 to show off the intersection of art, nature, and technology under the theme of "Machine Wilderness."

For two weeks, the notable art corridor between Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos played host to ISEA with a full schedule of panels, keynotes, performances, and all sorts of interesting and interactive art installations. … Read more

I love baking. I love technology. I just never thought to put the two together. Israel-based artist and designer Debbi Nitsan, however, is already on the case.

Nitsan created an entire collection of electronics with their original casings removed and replaced with new, 100 percent more delicious, bread casings. The items include clocks, radios, and flashlights.… Read more

The mundane task of turning on the lights generally involves a simple flick of the switch, but Norwegian designer Stian Korntved Ruud thinks it could get a lot more interesting.

Korntved Ruud, who graduated last year with a master's in industrial design from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, created "Circuit breaker," a series of five switches that force users to interact with the panel and thus present new ways of turning the lights on.… Read more

Italian artist Leonardo Ulian's mesmerizing piece "Technological mandala 02," doesn't look like the average sacred art commonly seen in Buddhism and Hinduism.

Ulian, based in London, created the mandala with hundreds of microchips, circuits, resistors, and other components found within everyday electronics.… Read more