The Free Universal Construction Kit

"Ever wanted to connect your Legos and Tinkertoys together? Now you can — and much more. Announcing the Free Universal Construction Kit: a set of adapters for complete interoperability between 10 popular construction toys.

F.A.T. Lab and Sy-Lab are pleased to present the Free Universal Construction Kit: a matrix of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten* popular children's construction toys. By allowing any piece to join to any other, the Kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems—enabling radically hybrid constructive play, the creation of previously impossible designs, and ultimately, more creative opportunities for kids. As with other grassroots interoperability remedies, the Free Universal Construction Kit implements proprietary protocols in order to provide a public service unmet—or unmeetable—by corporate interests.

The Free Universal Construction Kit offers adapters between Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K'Nex, Krinkles (Bristle Blocks), Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and Zoob. Our adapters can be downloaded from Thingiverse.com and other sharing sites as a set of 3D models in .STL format, suitable for reproduction by personal manufacturing devices like the Makerbot (an inexpensive, open-source 3D printer)."

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A humorous look at wildlife documentaries

Museum of the Moving Image: Cut Up (exhibition)

Exhibition: 'Cut Up'; 29 June–14 October 2013; In the Amphitheater Gallery; Organized by Jason Eppink, Associate Curator of Digital Media at The Museum of the Moving Image.

"From supercuts to mashups to remixes, Cut Up celebrates the practice of re-editing popular media to create new work, presenting contemporary videos by self-taught editors and emerging artists alongside landmarks of historic and genre-defining reappropriation.

Easy access to editing tools and distribution platforms now gives more people than ever before the opportunity to respond to the commercial products that shape our cultural dialogues. By plumbing a vast shared vocabulary of image and sound, audiences can express affiliation, criticize, or construct entirely new content using popular media as raw material. Re-edited videos are created and shared online daily by publics that spend increasing amounts of social time in front of networked screens. As the distinction between consumer and participant becomes ever more fluid, re-editing popular media has emerged as a common way of participating in a shared cultural conversation.

The exhibition presents a selection of short-form video works that take movies, music videos, television series, and news broadcasts as their source material, focusing on genres and techniques that have emerged online over the past decade and their on- and offline precedents."

Austin Kleon: Steal Like An Artist

"Austin Kleon's talk 'Steal Like An Artist' is a creative manifesto based on 10 things he wish he'd heard when he was starting out. Austin is a writer and artist. He's the author of Newspaper Blackout, a best–selling book of poetry made by redacting newspaper articles with a permanent marker. Austin's talk was delivered as part of the TEDxKC presentation of TEDxChange. Austin's work (including his new book) 'Steal Like An Artist' has been featured on NPR's Morning Edition, PBS Newshour, and in The Wall Street Journal. He speaks about creativity, visual thinking, and being an artist online for organizations such as SXSW and The Economist."

(TEDx Talk, 2012, Kansas City)

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Do Look Now: A playful meditation on sexual pleasures

"From academic and cinephile Helen Yeates comes this 16–minute mash–up of sexual and erotic scenes that creatively pushed the sensual boundaries of cinema, challenging audiences over the last four decades.

An ironic intercutting of arousing and transgressive scenes, Do Look Now creates a provocative interplay of love, sex, desire, humour, nostalgic yearning and cultural memory.

Part postmodern pastiche, part cut–up passion project, Yeates's creation explores the contours of female eroticism and sexual politics, playing with the way context can lend fresh meaning and nuance to sexual depictions."

(Brisbane International Film Festival, 2012)

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