Click here to view the embedded video.

Directing artists Karen Cusolito and Dan Das Mann designed and envisioned the Infinitarium, a massive interactive sculpture garden that will span an acre and will include state-of-the-art lighting controls and user-controlled pyrotechnic flame effects. It will be a larger-than-life magical botanical garden and will travel to many events and festivals, premiering at the Electric Daisy Carnival, Sand By The Ton, Outside Lands Festival, Burning Man, the PDX Bridge Festival and many more. http://theinfinitarium.com

I’m using a hacked Canon S1is digital still camera and a kit-made 7.4v power supply (kit from Adafruit Industries) connected to a 12v deep cycle marine battery and combining photos and video from my iPhone as well as a mini DV video camera.

My Timelapse Camera Rig

Special thanks to Phil “pEEf” Sadow for assistance with setting up the Canon hack and for the 2nd camera.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Just found a picture of me from 2002 where I’m on stilts, dressed as Uncle Sam, drumming at an anti-war protest in San Francisco!

who knew?

A Big hit hit with kids of all ages, the Raygun Rover rolled around the tarmac at Nasa Ames Research center April 10th, along with the Raygun Gothic Rocketship, Les Claypool, The Black Keys, Glitch Mob, Beats Antique and many more talented and amazing people!

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Tom Sepe, with the Higgs-Boson particle he photographed in his home labratory

“It’s small, its elusive, but its very friendly!” says Tom Sepe of the Higgs-Boson particle he photographed in his garage on Monday.

Scientists have been looking for the Higgs-Boson or “God Particle” for decades but “They’ve been going about it all wrong!” says Sepe, who was able to coax the quantum particle out of hiding with just the right music.

As Sepe explains; “Sages have been saying for thousands of years that every thing is just vibration, the music of the spheres and whatnot. Look, the Higgs-Boson has been here since the dawn of time (or just .0000001 seconds after) it has good tastes, it’s seen it all. You can’t just build a big a huge ugly billion dollar machine and expect a cool party. These things have to be understood from an emotional point of view as well! Its quantum physics man! Its Craazzy! We understand this stuff out in California.”

Sorry Switzerland.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

here’s a little video tease shot with a Casio EX-FS10 at 400 frames per second of my X-Patriot missile:

Click here to view the embedded video.

4 “D” motors. cardboard tube, foam-core fins, whiffle-ball nosecone, perfect paint job. no recovery method. Tahoe WORC trip 2010. Shot with Casio EX-FS10 camera at 400 fps.

stay tuned for the rest!

The winter storms. Warehouses open their doors and close them again. The treehouse must move. Out of Treasure Island and into the badlands of East Oakland… NIMBY takes us in for a while as we make a list of that which needs fixing; Wiring, windows, holes in walls, a new roof.

In June the Treehouse moves to Delaware to be installed a brewery,.. we’ve got our work cut out for us!

Last week I attended an incredible talk by Wade Davis titled: The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World – The Long Now. It was hosted by the Long Now Foundation at Herbst Theater in Fort Mason.

Mr. Davis is a fantastic storyteller – I’m not even sure I could catch him breathing… the words flowed out of him like water from the sky, a cascade of anecdotes, facts, feelings and extraordinary intelligence. After the break is an intro by Stuart Brand of the Long Now, and a link if you want to listen to the whole talk as a podcast here: Wade Davis – Long Now Podcast – 50MB

Native guidance

What does it mean to be human and alive?

The thousands of different cultures and languages on Earth have compellingly different answers to that question. “We are a wildly imaginative and creative species,” Davis declared, and then proved it with his accounts and photographs of humanity plumbing the soul of culture, of psyche, and of landscape.

He began with Polynesians, the wayfinders who mastered the Pacific ocean in the world’s largest diaspora. Without writing or chronometers they learned 220 stars by name, learned to read the subtle influence of distant islands on wave patterns and clouds, and navigated the open sea by a sheer act of integrative memory. For the duration of an ocean passage “navigators do not sleep.”

In the Amazon, which used to be thought of as a “green hell” or “counterfeit paradise,” living remnants may be found of complex forest civilizations that transformed 20 percent of the land into arable soil. The Anaconda peoples carry out five-day rituals with 250 people in vast longhouses, and live by stringent rules such as requiring that everyone must marry outside their language. Their mastery of botany let them find exactly the right combination of subspecies of plants to concoct ayahuasca, a drug so potent that one ethnobotantist described the effect of having it blown up your nose by a shaman as “like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing in a sea of electricity.”

In the Andes the Incas built 8,500 miles of roads over impossibly vertical country in a hundred years, and their descendents still run the mountains on intense ritual pilgrimages, grounding their culture in every detail of the landscape.

In Haiti, during the four years Davis spent discovering the chemical used to make real-life zombies, he saw intact African religion alive in the practice of voodoo. “The dead must serve the living by becoming manifest” in those possessed. It was his first experience in “the power of culture to create new realities.”

The threat to cultures is often ideological, Davis noted, such as when Mao whispered in the ear of the Dalai Lama that “all religion is poison,” set about destroying Tibetan culture.

The genius of culture is the ability to survive in impossible conditions, Davis concluded. We cannot afford to lose any of that variety of skills, because we are not only impoverished without it, we are vulnerable without it.

PS. Wade Davis’ SALT talk was based on his five Massey Lectures in Canada last year, which are collected in a book, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World.

– by Stewart Brand

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Non-Newtonian Fluid Dynamics demonstrates what may be happening inside your skull when you listen to music at a club! This scientific experiment uses a tone generator, an amplifier and a speaker cone to create chaotic waveforms inside a a mixture of cornstarch and water.

YouTube - This is your Brain on Techno.

The Hexayurt is a new kind of sheltering solution. To make the simplest hexayurt, make a wall by putting six sheets of plywood on their sides in a hexagon. Cut six more sheets in half diagonally, and screw them together into a shallow cone. Lift with a large group on to the wall, and fasten with more screws. This shelter will last for several years and costs less than $100. It may be ideal for a variety of disaster relief situations.

(via: Hexayurt Project.)

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite