Last week, at a former bodega in Alphabet City, food designer Emilie Baltz and smart object designer Carla Diana conducted the second performance of their "Lickestra"—a "musical licking performance" involving conductive ice cream cones, four volunteers, and a pre-recorded soundtrack of peculiar tones and baselines created by musician Arone Dyer of Buke&Gase.
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This is not your typical orchestra. The instruments look especially unusual, and that’s because each of them is made using decommissioned weapons.
They were put together by artist Pedro Reyes in an effort to convert weapons into actual, playable instruments. You might remember Pedro from his previous work, where he built a fully-mechanized orchestra.
Disarm is comprised of eight instruments and was made possible through a collaboration with Cocolab, a media studio in Mexico City, and various musicians.
Their first step was to gather pistols, rifles, and shotguns that were previously used by drug cartels. They were then taken apart and put together once more to create musical instruments that are controlled with the use of computers. The instruments can even be pre-programmed to play music.
Several of the Disarm instruments will be on display at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh on October 5, 2013.
[via Colossal]
Anyone who gets a regular deluge of email knows how tough it is to clear the inbox rather than just hope all those messages will go away. Orchestra thinks its new Mailbox app for the iPhone has a simple solution to the glut: treat email like task management. Along with reducing mail deletion to a single swipe, it lets readers postpone action until the evening, the following day or whenever it’s easier to handle. It may come in handy for a few power users as well when it supports multiple accounts and can send push notifications. There are a number of caveats beyond just the iOS-only nature, however — it supports just Gmail for now, and it doesn’t have ways to assign custom labels or select multiple messages at once, like Google’s app. When Mailbox is free, however, it’s worth a try if your inbox has ever looked more like a monument to neglect than a clean slate.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Apple
Via: The Next Web
Source: App Store
You might recall musician Diwa de Leon from his entertaining and amusing performances of the Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Galaxy music. Well, Diwa is back, and this time he’s formed a new musical group – the Mini Mario Orchestra.
And the first performance of the Mini Mario Orchestra? Well, you’d think he’d play a bunch of music from platformers, but to keep us on our toes, Diwa has decided to do an awesome medley of RPG themes instead – all while dressed up as Mario, and playing each and every instrument himself:
Now wasn’t that special? Mario playing the Dragonborn theme from Skyrim and the Main theme from Mass Effect seems a little out of place, but it’s still pretty great. I only wish he would have played some more tracks from the Paper Mario series. I’d think that would be more appropriate.
If you liked what you saw (and heard,) be sure to swing by and comment on the video’s YouTube page, and let Diwa know what other tunes you’d like to hear from the Mini Mario Orchestra. Personally, I’d like to hear the Casino Night theme from Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
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