@1984

Healing Tool, by Brian Kane (via, via):

Healing Tool is art designed for people in cars. A temporary public art installation using digital billboards on interstate freeways.

The goal is to provide a moment of temporary relief and unexpected beauty during the daily grind of commuting.

The piece builds on a body of work which simulates digital experiences in the real world. In this case, simulating the Photoshop Healing Tool to replace or patch over the landscape which is blocked by the billboard.

“Instead of having fingers that find the buttons, we built buttons that find the fingers,” said Stanford’s Sohan Dharmaraja, one of the researchers on the project.

Users place eight fingers on the screen and the keyboard appears. Shaking the device activates a menu, and further interaction is achieved by regular touch gestures.

Under Californian law, details of car accidents remain confidential.

However, Google said its driverless cars had never been the cause of an accident, and that the majority of “minor fender-benders” had been in the form of rear-end collisions from other drivers.

“Safety is our highest priority. Since the start of our programme six years ago, we’ve driven nearly a million miles autonomously, on both freeways and city streets, without causing a single accident,” said a spokesperson

We are very excited to announce the fifth annual Theorizing the Web! We’ll be two days again, April 17th and 18th. And the International Center of Photography has partnered with us to provide space for the event in lower Manhattan.

Venture Capital Firm Appoints an AI to Board of Directors

The tool was developed by Aging Analytics UK who’s licensing it out to DKV, a capital fund that focuses on companies developing therapies for age-related diseases and regenerative medicine.

DKV will use VITAL (Validating Investment Tool for Advancing Life Sciences) to analyze financing trends in databases of life science companies in an effort to predict successful investments.

It works by poring over massive data sets and applying machine learning to predict which life science companies will make successful investments.

The company has already used VITAL to inform investment decisions in two start-up life science companies, Pathway Pharmaceuticals, Limited in Hong Kong and InSilico Medicine, Inc in Baltimore, USA. The long-term goal is to get the intelligence to the stage where it’ll be capable of autonomously allocating an investment portfolio.

VOLUME / A5

Art project by Luigi Amato and Roberto Arista is a publication that focuses on the design features of a book as tech as opposed to the content the medium conventionally delivers:

VOLUME is the first of a series of experimental publications involving the book form as the specific meaning of its realization. Deliberately inspired by The new art of making books by the artist and collector Ulises Carrión, this publication inquiries the book as an autonomous and self-sufficient medium, a volume in the space in which the physical aspects (dimensions, weight, page numbers, sequentiality an so on) and the modes of fruition become the content of the book itself. Through a script, it has been possible to measure the single page properties and the relation between multiple pages along the space-time sequence of the book. The data made visible by VOLUME show the continuous physical and perceptive variations acting in/on the book during the reading process.

Smart Textiles: Clothes That Monitor Your Biomedical Data

Canadian researchers have developed “smart textiles” able to monitor and transmit wearers’ biomedical information via wireless or cellular network by superimposing multiple layers of copper, polymers, glass, and silver.

“The fiber acts as both sensor and antenna. It is durable but malleable, and can be woven with wool or cotton, and signal quality is comparable to commercial antennas,” explained Professor Younes Messaddeq at Université Laval…