troika

Troika – Digital by Design & Interview

by Andy Polaine on November 11, 2008

in General

Troika_Digital By Design-Book_s.jpg

Troika have a new book out called Digital by Design: Crafting Technology for Products and Environments. It is a wide-ranging survey of works that use new and emerging digital technologies, often crossed with physical interactions and products that blur the boundaries between art and design. They have managed to collect together work from a fantastic range of contributors, including my mates over at Hulger.

I visited Troika a while back and interviewed for a Podcast on Core77 and really like their approach to what they do and they’re lovely people too.

I plan to review Digital by Design for the soon-to-be-launched Designers Review of Books, but in the meantime you can buy it from Amazon.co.uk here (or Amazon.com here).

I also wrote a profile on them in my Foreign Policy column for Desktop. It seemed a fitting time for another “From the Archives” interview post. You can read the full Desktop article after the jump… [click to continue…]

Tagged as: book, digitalbydesign, interview, studio, troika

Mac Virus with Gravitas

by Andy Polaine on March 5, 2008

in Uncategorized

newton-computer04.jpg

Troika, the folks behind the cloud sculpture at Heathrow, have created a virus on a USB stick, called the Newton Virus (for manual infection) that makes your desktop fall to pieces. It also uses the tilt sensors in the Macbooks for some gravity fun so you can shake the pieces around.

The piece isn’t design to be malicious. It harks back to the golden days when viruses were there to amuse rather than to destroy:

The virus will then hit at random, but only once. It will not replicate itself, mail itself to your friends or destroy any of your files, but instead provides you with moments of blissful surprise and magic.

See the video on Gizmodo.

I’m going to visit Troika this week to do a podcast for Core77. I’ll see if I can get infected.

(Via NOTCOT).

[tags]Troika, virus, macbook, play, playful[/tags]

Tagged as: Art, Design, macbook, Play, playful, troika, virus

Troika is on Cloud, er, Five

January 25, 2008

If you haven’t already explored the background behind Troika’s cloud for BA’s Terminal 5 – “a five meter long digital sculpture whose surface is covered with 4638 flip-dots that can be individually addressed by a computer to animate the entire skin of the sculpture” – Pixelsumo has got the goods and also images of the [...]

Read the full article →