Hasta La Gadget!

When Nikola Tesla invented his coil in 1891, he probably never imagined the ominous structures taking the place of the violin or French horn. But with time, anything’s possible. Music trio ArcAttack adds its own spin to Tesla’s dream machine.

We gather around the group in a circle, about 8 or 10 feet away from the Tesla coils as the band performs. This is not some “don’t want to dance in front of the stage” kind of teenage awkwardness—if you stand too close when the band plays, you might actually get electrocuted.

When the lights go down, a loud buzz generates, followed by streaks of lighting into the air. Then the music begins, followed by the sound of drums that are precise as can be. What follows is an overload of light and sound that is pure amazing, a melange of familiar melodies from our favorite video games (Mario and Zelda themes), TV shows (Airwolf) and pop songs (“Sexyback”).

Once the band stops playing, we still can’t roam freely. First, they must discharge the coils, ridding them of any stray lightning bolts that might be trapped inside.

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Consisting of a pair of Tesla coils—plus a pair of LED-equipped robotic drums and an Open Labs sound console—the ArcAttack experience is largely automated, suggestive of a future era when a musical performance isn’t about the people playing the instruments, but rather the technology involved.

ArcAttack hails from Austin, Texas and certainly don’t fit the mold of what most consider a band should be. But that’s a good thing.

John Di Prima is the man behind the boards, responsible for the execution of the live show. He controls the coils and drums, plus mixing in a few new sounds during the set. He’s also responsible for most of the songwriting and drum programming.

Patrick Brown, aka Parsec, is the master of ceremonies, decked out in steampunk-esque attire consisting of a Faraday Suit with a string of lights that react with the Tesla coils, plus the requisite lightning-proof goggles. He’s the link between the crowd and the show. He found the Di Prima brothers at an Austin Burning Man event and jokes that he’s managed to not get kicked out yet.

Joe Di Prima designs, builds and maintains everything for the group, serving as the technician when the show is on the road. When they’re composing and recording, he plays guitar. With a background in electronics repair, Joe eventually linked up with the engineering department at the University of Texas, where he first learned about the magic of Tesla coils.

I took a few minutes to interview ArcAttack—what makes them who they are—besides the Tesla coils, of course…

——-

Gizmodo: What does your setup consist of?

Joe: It would be two DRSSTC (Dual Resident Solid State Tesla Coil) units which are MIDI controlled. There’s a fiber optic cable running to some digital logic boards that are in the Tesla coils.

John: The Open Labs MiKO MIDI console hosts the PC Software (Fruity Loops) that we use to actually sequence the music.

The MiKO is just a Windows machine with a bunch of nice MIDI interfaces, cased in metal—which is nice because we have a lot of EMF emitted from the coils. I actually used to run it off my laptop, but it would crash all the time.

Patrick: The drum machine has a solenoid for every drum, and they’re MIDI controlled also…from the MiKO.

Gizmodo: How did you get the idea to create a musical show using Tesla coils? Had it been done before this?

Joe: When we did it originally, it was the first time it had been done in this manner. There are a few ways that you can audio modulate a Tesla coil—this way is known as PRM modulation. Now there are a few dozen people that picked up on it, but nobody does it to the scale that we do. It’s still fairly new, and surprisingly still fairly unknown.

When I first saw a solid state Tesla coil in operation, I understood how it worked. After a few minutes of playing with it, I got the idea that, many years later, I put into practice.

Gizmodo: Who are some of your musical and tech influences?

John: Well obviously Nikola Tesla. For music, we all have pretty different tastes. But the cool thing with our project is that we can do anything from Pantera to the Chicken Dance and people would dig it. I listen to electronic rock, Kraftwerk, Daft Punk…if I could do a show with Daft Punk, you could shoot me afterward.

Joe: I didn’t know what music was until three years ago. For tech influences, hard to say, but Faraday, all my mentors at all the repair shops, my dad (who was a biomedical engineer) and Steve Ward, the father of the DRSSTC, who I met at the University of Texas.

Gizmodo: What are some of the weirdest/favorite/disastrous shows you’ve played?

John: Joe had to tackle a cop once.

Joe: Yeah the cops had come shut down this rave we were playing at, and the Tesla coils were still running. He was coming over to shut our stuff off, not knowing exactly what it was, and he was walking straight into the Tesla coils. So I grabbed him and pushed him back. Amazingly he did not Tase me. He was actually kinda grateful. Funniest part is, after they kicked everyone out, they walked around and asked if we could turn the stuff back on.

Patrick: My favorite show so far was when we played DragonCon in Atlanta a few weeks ago. We did the Mad Scientist Ball. We had our big Tesla coils and a Faraday cage, and revealed our new stage show, which assisted people in transforming themselves into true joy…by being bathed in the Tesla coil rays.

During our stage performance, there were about 15 people that we put into the cage, and this one guy named Dr. Satan had big metal wings that he put onto his back. We get him up there, but the cage is kinda small, and he has metal sticking out all over his body. So we tell him “don’t move.” Soon the entire crowd started chanting along. That was pretty cool. [And obviously Dr. Satan lived through it.]

John: We were in the Netherlands for two weeks, and we played a heavy metal fest where they put us in front of this church that was lit all demonic looking. On our stage, there were these big glass viewing areas where you could see the deceased founders of the town. I think that’s pretty much the most epic thing ever. Heavy metal music through lightning over visible graves.

Q: What is the one gadget you can’t live without?

Joe: My iPhone.

Patrick: My Dell laptop.

John: The Open Labs MiKO console. If it was human, I’d marry it.

Gizmodo Gallery 2009
Groupe
267 Elizabeth Street
New York, NY 10012

Gallery Dates:
September 23rd-27th

Times:

9/22 Tuesday
Media Day by appointment only. For info please contact gallery@gizmodo.com.

9/23 Wednesday
12-8

9/24 Thursday
12-8

9/25 Friday
12-8

9/26 Saturday
11-8
9-? – Live Musical Performance

9/27 Sunday
11-6

Read more about our Giz Gallery 09 here, follow @gizgallery on Twitter and see what else we’ll be playing with at the event.And special thanks to Toyota’s Prius — without their sponsorship, there would be no Gizmodo Gallery.

Grand Central Dispatch may not exactly be a household name to the average Apple user, but it’s certainly a hot topic among developers, who may know it better as “libdispatch,” and are no doubt thrilled that Apple has now made the whole thing open source. Among other things, that means developers are now able to take full advantage of multi-core processors in Snow Leopard, which obviously has some fairly big implications for applications as soon as those developers are able to get a handle on things. Know what you’re doing? Just like to get in over your head? Then you can find the complete source code and other necessary information at the read link below.

[Via Slashdot]

Filed under: Software

Apple’s Grand Central Dispatch goes open source — get at those cores, people originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know, there are a slew of devices out there that’ll let you indulge in some graffiti action without sullying your hands (or breaking the law). Indeed, we’ve seen real time 3D paintings in galleries and something called the Wiispray, and now we have Eyewriter. An ongoing effort by a group of graffiti artists from around the world, this open source project has designed and built a low-cost eye-tracking system to enable people like Tony Quam (a.k.a. TEMPTONE), who is paralyzed, to create artwork moving only his eyes. But that ain’t all — the group also designed a “mobile broadcast unit,” which is essentially a low-powered, networked bicycle capable of projecting the business onto the side of a building (or street sign, or train). The kids responsible for this heartwarming example of “eye vandalism” promise that how-to materials, software, and the like will all be available soon, but in the meantime check a video of the thing in action after the break.

[Via Jailbreak]

Continue reading DIY Eyewriter brings the joy of art, vandalism to those with ALS

Filed under: Displays, Peripherals

DIY Eyewriter brings the joy of art, vandalism to those with ALS originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Slowly but surely, the mega-corp who has historically clung tight to its own formats while the world opts for others is finally seeing the light. Just over a year after Sony pushed out an update that enabled its Reader to use purchased books in the open EPUB format, the outfit is now promising to sell digital books only in that format by the year’s end. Moreover, Sony is aiming to nix its “proprietary anti-copying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied.” Once the switchover takes place, books purchased in Sony’s online store will be readable on any device that supports EPUB, one of which will be Plastic Logic’s forthcoming e-reader. And to think — if only this change of heart would’ve happened prior to the introduction of ATRAC…

Filed under: Displays, Handhelds

Sony takes Reader openness one step further, will offer EPUB titles only originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Aug 2009 07:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Ars Technica has received confirmation from two sources that Google is working on new software named Google Chrome OS, which will offer a cloud-based, OS experience around the browser. UPDATE: It’s official. It’s coming in the second half of 2010.

Google says the OS is open source and lightweight, allowing users super quick access to the web. They claim the OS will be virus free (the security architecture is entirely new), and run a newly-designed windowing system on top of a Linux kernel that will be compatible with x86 and ARM processors alike. Though they were quick to mention this was separate from Android, they also conceded there would be some overlap in concept and functionality between the two platforms.

While the discussion of specific apps (and how they will work) was vague, Google made reference to a developer ecosystem that will be heavily web-based, and apps would be compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux (obviously). In a nutshell, it looks like Google Chrome OS is about simplicity, speed, safety, and cloud computing.

The announcement of Google Chrome OS is a big step forward for a company who slowly and subtly wedged their way into web app development. Google says that Chrome OS is intended for “power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” So what does this mean for Google, and more importantly, what does this mean for Microsoft and Apple?

I think that Google has primed themselves to take a big chunk out of the mainstream computing market. That’s not to say that you or I will be exclusively using Chrome OS, but with the internet becoming more and more accessible from ANYWHERE, our parents, grandparents and technophobic siblings probably will be converts. Most of them are already familiar with Google as a brand, and frustrated in trying to learn the intricacies of current operating systems.

And even for those of us who consider ourselves technologically advanced, how much of the desktop experience have Google’s web apps already replaced? We’ll still have our main computers, but what will be running on our netbooks or old laptops that sit in the living room?

More and more, I find myself working almost exclusively with apps that exist entirely on the web, or with clients that connect to web services. The only apps I use that aren’t cloud-happy are either utilities, media players or photo/video editors. And even then, those are heading in that web-centric direction. Cloud computing has been bringing us closer and closer to the mainframe days of yore. Google wants to be the only backbone working behind the scenes. By saying they’re keeping Chrome OS app development web-centric and platform-agnostic, they’re slowly luring us techies into their web.

Still, Windows and OSX will always have a spacious home in the computer world, undoubtedly. Some apps will always require native architecture, and the businessmen, code-monkeys, graphic designers, video editors and other connoisseurs of nuanced computing would be foolhardy to try and work strictly in the cloud.

But the final hurdle for Google to overcome is easy, accessible online storage. Will they be able to go after Amazon’s S3 cloud servers? And perhaps more importantly, will they be able to offer the service for free? If they can let us really extend our hard drives into the cloud, look out. Chrome OS will be a force to be reckoned with.

But do we really have to wait a year to get our hands on this thing? [Ars Technica and Google]