Harold Cohen was a British painter in the ‘60s who ended up in the Stanford AI lab in 1971, using plotters (and initially turtle robots) to draw images created by a chunk of code he called AARON. There are some bits of that code - particularly the ‘freehand line algorithm’ and its collision detection allowing lines to meet without crossing - that I can’t really understand how they worked on such primitive hardware & software:
https://www.katevassgalerie.com/blog/harold-cohen-aaron-comp...
A favourite paper: “ A Microfluidic D-subminiature Connector” “ Standardized, affordable, user-friendly world-to-chip interfaces represent one of the major barriers to the adoption of microfluidics. We present a connector system for plug-and-play interfacing of microfluidic devices to multiple input and output lines.”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3786702/
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32886596
When I lived on a farm in wales, we would occasionally discover in our fields something called bog oak. This was trunks of oak placed in the ground by ancient farmers to drain a field. Over the centuries this had become semi-fossilized and in the process had become very strong. From high quality bog oak, it is possible to make wooden rings as strong as metal. Our bog oak was not so good (I tried) but certainly good enough for super strong dowels and suchlike.
I saw and enjoyed bag piece at the recent Tate retrospective- pretty much as she describes it the contrast between the experience of the people inside the bag (giggling, wriggling) and the people standing round watching int the gallery was interesting & memorable. And as for cut piece - obviously related to the later Rhythm 0 by Marina Abramovic - unless you think there’s no possible value in performance art, this seems to me like pretty remarkable work.
Such a wild take after looking at, for example, a propaganda poster captioned “Work together to develop pig breeding and new varieties of rice” where the artist has decided to make the pigs in question bright purple with yin-yang signs on their backs.
I worked at The Times in London when we did this - we lost ~98.7% of our free audience, retained a smaller ad business, turned a £20mn / year loss into a £20mn / year profit over a few years.
