It's not easy to take an object as familiar and functional as a table or chair and turn it into something new and exciting - but this semester, students in John Baird's Furniture Making class did just that, creating usable and beautiful works of art & design.  

Baird's class had two major assignments.  For the midterm project, students were asked to create a piece of furniture using a 48x48" square of Medium Density Fiberboard and mechanical fasteners. 

L - R: Dylan Box works on his MDF chair;  Charles Samuels - MDF Table

For their more open-ended final projects, students designed and developed chairs, tables, cabinets, and other objects.  They were allowed to follow their interests in fabrication methods and materials, so the finished projects incorporated everything from cement to carbon fiber to fiberglass.

Penn Greene sketches and...

New news? Old news? Who cares, it's good news: Earlier this week, Vimeo (PLAY's preferred video hosting site) finally released an iPhone app, and it's actually pretty awesome.  

Sure, it lets you browse Vimeo's videos, "like" them, leave comments and all that stuff that you'd expect from Vimeo - in other words, a lot like the YouTube iPhone app, but better looking....

Here's where things really get interesting: the Vimeo app also gives you a way to edit video that you shoot with your iPhone's pretty decent camera!   The controls and capabilities are pretty basic, but let me repeat that: you're shooting and editing movies on an iPhone!  This functionality is also available in Apple's iMovie app, but the big difference is that Vimeo gives it to you for free (not that Apple's $4.99 price tag is that bad, but compared to free...).

So proceed without haste to...

Opening this afternoon at the Duderstadt Gallery, the /bin/art exhibition showcases student projects developed in Adaptive Art: an interdisciplinary class offered by the School of Art & Design and the College of Engineering.

Co-taught by Satinder Baveja (Computer Science & Engineering), director of the University of Michigan's AI laboratory with expertise in machine learning, and Osman Khan (School of Art & Design), an artist who uses technology to create interactive installations, Adaptive Art focused on using computation, algorithms and machine learning as mediums for aesthetic expressions.  In this class, computers aren't something that you do your work on - instead, they're a vital part of the finished work, and might even have created it on their own.

Working in teams that mixed Engineering and Art & Design students, the class used Arduino microcontrollers and...

Last Friday, I was on my way back to my office with a second cup of coffee when I ran into a group of gladiators, breakdancers and pirates on the first floor - and even here at the School of Art & Design, that is something that just doesn't happen all the time.   I eventually figured out that they were students in Matt Shlian's TMP 1: Construction class, and were in the middle of a performance/critique.  I managed to get a few pictures...

The assignment: Student teams had to traverse the street gallery (the hallway outside of Slusser Gallery), staying at least 6" off the ground. This traversal also had to be performative, keeping their audience (the rest of the class) in mind.

The tools: foam core board and glue.  

The teams of students tackled this assignment in pretty amazingly different ways:

A gladiator, complete with foam core armor, shield, and sword danced...

Way back in 1975, a whole bunch of San Francisco artists made, raced, and occasionally crashed $100 soap box derby racers in a SF MOMA benefit.  This clip is a great archive of a particular place and time -  and it's filled with great quotes like "A banana is the fastest fruit I could think of."  Oh, and a car made out of bread.