Who invented pin art

But the Tangible Media Group, led by Professor Hiroshi Ishii, wants to push the limits even further by replacing your standard digital screens with a more interactive, tangible 3D interface.

Imagine that the pins on inForm replacing pixels on your screen. If this product were miniaturized it could be used for a wide variety of applications across various industries. A similar tangible interface is already used in the field of architecture to create more realistic 3D models of buildings that simulate solar shadows and wind flow simulations.

You could also probably imagine this technology leading to new gaming systems, mechanical modeling, or even interactive art. In many cases, a tangible interface may be preferable over a digital one because it is physically intuitive and allows us to take better advantage of hand-eye coordination. However, most practical applications are decades and hundreds of thousands of dollars of research away.

Because of this, many see the comments on the YouTube video are quick to exclaim that we are wasting thousands of dollars on a cool, yet practically useless toy. These people would be wrong. While institutions like MIT must be strategic in how they allocate research funds, we should not downplay the importance of investing in projects with potentially great future benefits. New workplaces, new food sources, new medicine--even an entirely new economic system.

In , contemporary artist Ward Fleming came up with a clever idea. He set hundreds of round-ended metal pins on a boxed grid so that the pins could only move on one axis. Now, a group of Spanish artists is reviving the concept in their own reimagination of the year-old installation—with a fiery twist. The art studios Nituniyo and Memosesmas came up with the idea after reflecting on the nature of Las Fallas , a festival that honors Saint Joseph every March in Valencia, Spain.

During the year leading up to this week of parties, artists from all over Valencia create gigantic sculptural installations using wood and cardboard. These huge pieces, which can tower three stories over partiers, often lambast politicians and celebrities. The artists looked at these sculptural statements and decided that perhaps it was time to modernize the concept.

The artists made the frame out of multiple boards of OSB , carefully cut with a CNC machine to create the regular hole pattern. The long cardboard tubes were then inserted inside the holes to create the super-sized pin screen. Still, this unusual falla —which was burned down on March 19, —was beautiful. In comparison to most fallas , which tend to follow a classic figurative approach , I like the low-res pixel look.

Plus, it recaptures the joy of playing with the pin screens of yore, remixing an old tradition in a new way—plus a heavy dose of nostalgia.