The Lost Type Co-Op is a Pay-What-You-Want Type foundry, the first of its kind. Founded by Riley Cran and Tyler Galpin, originally in a whirlwind 24 hour adventure to distribute a single typeface, Lost Type has blossomed into a full fledged foundry, distributing fonts from designers all over the world, with its unique model. Users have the opportunity to pay whatever they like for a font, you can even type in ‘$0′ for a free download. 100% of funds from these sales go directly to the designers of the fonts, respectively. Lost Type takes no cut of sales, and holds no funds.

[Lost Type Co-op]

Have you ever noticed how most camera accessories are black and grey? That’s okay, but sometimes you want some color, and Rigu will give you that. Rad camera shop!

[RIGU Camera Accessories]

[OneReceipt]

Blurb is giving you a new way to share your Instagram photos — in a book. Take the popular iPhone® app’s analog-like effects, match them with Blurb’s high-quality book printing, and give your best-loved (and most-liked) photos a life beyond the feed. No download, no hassle. We automatically enhance the image resolution for printability and your book is made in just a few clicks.

[Make Instagram books with Blurb]

Postcardly turns your emails into real-life postcards, delivered by U.S. Mail. It’s especially great for staying in touch with older family members who don’t use computers. You can send postcards from your phone, your computer, or anywhere you have email. Just send an email with an attached photo the way you normally send an email: your photo will be on the front of the postcard, your words will go on the back.

[Postcardly]

Super sweet online Photo Lettering tool from House Industries.

[House Industries Photo Lettering]

There is no unequivocal definition of life. The best that scientists can come up with is a description of characteristics that objects observed to be “living” seem to have in common.

There is a list of activities or processes that “living things” do — like undergo metabolism, respond to stimuli, reproduce, etc. — but they seem to boil down to two characteristics: they tend to have some kind of signalling abilities, and they are self-sustaining, at least over a period of time.

How about viruses? Are they alive? They carry with them the code required for reproduction, but they can’t actually carry it out without help from outside. They have to take over another cell’s machinery in order to make more copies of themselves. They don’t seem to have much in the way of biological processes to sustain, and as for signalling abilities — they are a bundle of DNA or RNA code wrapped up inside a protein package; thus, rather than having the ability to signal, they seem to be the signal, themselves.

Dutch artist Theo Jansen doesn’t waste time or energy quibbling over the definitions. Focusing on the ability to interact with and move about their environment, Jansen has created a series of mobile sculptures that he insists on referring to as a new life form. Having created them, he sets them free to roam about his native Netherlands beaches. Accordingly, he calls them strandbeests — Dutch for “beach creatures.”

And “roam about” they do. To see one of Jansen’s strandbeests in action inevitably creates the impression of viewing a living thing. Powered by the wind, they stop and start, change direction, and move with an impression of inner purposefulness. Or at least the semblance of it. Even standing still, their vanes twitch and sway in the wind in a way that is not immediately attributable to the wind, itself.

Nor is their choice of direction. Though powered by the wind, strandbeests do not just move in any direction the wind blows. Jansen has built into them mechanisms by which they can sense and respond to obstacles. Encountering the water, a strandbeest changes direction and continues on its way. Jansen’s strandbeests respond and move about their environment so naturally, they inevitably beg the question, What is Life?

Conway's Game of Life: "Breeder" animation

The Game of Life

To John Conway, Life is a game. Or, more accurately, it is a cellular automaton, a computer program. Just as Jansen’s strandbeests derive their complicated behaviors from sets of simple structures, Conway’s Game of Life is driven by a simple set of rules. A very simple set, in fact:

1. Underpopulation: Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies.
2. Health: Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
3. Overcrowding: Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies.
4. Reproduction: Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell.

The cells are represented as a gridwork of squares on a page. Colored-in squares are “live,” and cells the same color as the background are “dead.” To jump-start Conway’s world, the Player colors in some cells. This is the seed state. Then the rules are set in motion and the conditions of Life play out. The role of the Player in this Game of Life is to set the initial seed, then sit back and watch.

a Glider

One would expect this simple instruction set to result in a short and simple game. Instead, the watcher sees patterns emerge in the grid that appear to be behaviors. Some patterns, in fact, introduce the possibility of continuing the game indefinitely. One such pattern has been dubbed a “Glider,” for the way it propagates itself across the playing field. This pattern is so simple and iconic, it has been turned into an emblem of hacker culture.

Gosper's Glider Gun

When the game was young, Conway conjectured the possibility of an infinitely growing pattern, and offered a prize for the first person to come up with an example of one. Mathematician Bill Gosper, considered one of the cofounders of the hacker community, won the prize with the Glider Gun, a pattern that creates Gliders ad infinitum. There are other, bigger patterns, exhibiting even more complex behaviors, but the point is that they exhibit what can be described as “behavior” at all. By providing a computational basis for what has come to be known as “artificial life,” Conway and Gosper opened the doors for other pioneers. Like Theo Jansen.

According to biology, the basic building block of life is the cell. The basic building block of Jansen’s strandbeests is yellow plastic tubing of the type used in the construction industry for routing electrical cables. Using simple hand tools, Jansen combines sections of tubing with flexible sheeting, plastic hoses, recycled beverage bottles and other materials, to create mechanisms for movement. He chose these materials because they are readily available, inexpensive, easy to work with, and hold up well to conditions in the strandbeests’ environment, i.e., the beach. But he has created similar walking mechanisms from other materials, including wood and metal. Some of these constructions are large enough to carry passengers. Adhering to the Latin-based binomial nomenclature that taxonomists use, Jansen names his beasts according to genus and species. He calls one such transport device Animaris rhinoceros — “animaris” being a latinized shorthand for “animal of the sea.” And “rhinoceros” because… well, with its size, ponderous shape, and rough polyester skin, it looks like a rhinoceros. With people inside.

The mode of walking is what makes Jansen’s creatures so uncanny — not because they are strange, but because they move so naturally. We’re used to walking machines, metal spiders showing up at Burning Man, and the occasional dog-footed robot reports from the military. There’s a leg design called a Klann linkage that’s been around a while. Pretty standard for making walking mechanisms. But Jansen’s walking mechanism is something else again, which seems to follow its own graceful inner logic of movement. Animaris rhinoceros on the move, for example, looks not so much like a rhinoceros as like a chorus line of rhinoceroses boogalooing down Broadway in perfect sync. It houses no chips, no integrated circuits, no “brain” — just a deceptively simple feedback mechanism that has more in common with an old-time pendulum clock than with robots such as Honda’s state-of-the-art ASIMO. And therein lies both its elegance and its scalability. For “scalability” read not just size but adaptability. And for “adaptability,” read “future.” Jansen has a vision of the future for his strandbeests, and continually refines their design elements.

Animaris percipiere

Animaris percipiere uses the same basic walking mechanism as Rhinoceros, but it is clearly a step beyond, as the beauty (and complexity) of its internal structure testifies through its transparent skin. Percipiere is designed not as a mere transport mechanism. It is designed to be an autonomous entity. Or at least a step along the road to an autonomous entity. It sports a flexible wing along its back: a dorsal fin, if you will; and a row of recycled pop bottles. The bottles are connected by plastic tubing to simple pumps, not unlike bicycle pumps. The system serves Percipiere as a “digestive” system, the bottles being its “stomachs.” The wing, pushed by the wind, waves back and forth, driving the pumps. The pumps store pressurized air in the bottles. When sufficient pressure is reached… Animaris percipiere starts walking. The stored wind is routed into tubes that elongate under air pressure; these are Percipiere’s “muscles.” The muscles are connected by taps that can trigger other muscles in turn, like nerve ganglia (Jansen calls them “control centres”). Rather than simply being pushed by the wind, Percipiere “consumes” and stores the wind, and then uses it later, as needed. Which, taken together, is a pretty fair working description of what your “metabolism” does.

Why Life?

Jansen has come under criticism for his insistence on speaking of these mobile sculptures as “life forms.” He speaks thus of them because his ultimate aim, once they have reached a sufficient level of interaction with their environment — what biologists term irritability — is to turn them loose to fend for themselves.

Theo Jansen's Wind Lab

At his workshop on the dunes, Jansen continually refines his beasts. Once he’s learned everything he can from one design model, he declares it extinct and consigns it to his “boneyard,” where the sun and elements bleach the yellow plastic tubes, rendering them bonelike, indeed. Jansen has earned particular ire by claiming that his creations are refined by a process of evolution. Darwinians rightly point out that the whole point of evolutionary theory is that the driving mechanism is contained within the process, itself, and does not require an external hand guiding it — depends, in fact, on the absense of such a hand. These detractors fail to consider, however, that it is not this ongoing refinement of design that Jansen is necessarily referring to. Like evolution, Jansen is an eminently pragmatic experimentalist. In the early stages of his walking mechanism, rather than reiterate the painfully slow trial-and-error process of building and rebuilding a leg design, he did, in fact, employ a computer model that used a genetic algorithm, an accepted method for allowing a good design to refine itself over successive generations. Parameters for the design were allowed to perform inside the world of the computer model. More successful models were then allowed to “cross-pollinate,” eventually resulting in a design that would perform as desired in the real world. A genetic algorithm is, simply stated, evolution at work.

Jansen envisions an entire ecosystem of strandbeests of various shapes and sizes and levels of complexity, going about their day-to-day business, which business may be as incomprehensible to you and me as, well, your day-to-day business is to me, and vice versa. Will they eventually come to be able to reproduce themselves, as we do? It seems like a stretch — but in the meantime, it seems a bigger stretch for us humans to learn to avoid reproducing ourselves, willy-nilly. Will strandbeests come to exhibit other traits of “life”? Will they prey upon each other? It could be that the particular paradigm of predator and prey is simply the most expedient mechanism that evolution picked for carbon-based cellular life forms, but that it is not needed by Animaris of any stripe.

What we do know is that the definition of “living things” is as ever-changing as living things, themselves; it is continually revised as scholars encounter new entities. (Talk to a biologist about prions sometime.) We may come to realize, sooner rather than later, that the “definition” of life matters less than our attitude about it. One thing we can expect to see is unexpected (and perhaps even unpredictable) emergent behaviors, as strandbeests of new sizes and complexities proliferate.

Strandbeests of various sizes already exist. Small ones are even available as pets. You can buy a palm-sized strandbeest — Animaris ordis parvus (“Strandbeest of a small order”) — in plastic kit form, from Theo Jansen’s website. Assemble it. “Feed” it by blowing your breath upon its windvanes. Watch it move. And prepare to be enchanted.

Everybody’s favorite notebook, Moleskine, has announced a new kind of social ecommerce platform that allows fans and consumers to purchase one-of-a-kind, customized notebooks, journals and planners directly from artists.

More than just another online store, the Moleskine Artist Marketplace is a centralized hub for sharing work, discovering new work, trading tips, and purchasing notebooks from favorite artists. Artistic techniques and mediums including embroidery, origami, oil paint, photography, even taxidermy are on display.

“[Moleskine notebooks] give me inspiration to create something new and unpredictable,” said Stella Sbilenca, an Italian illustrator who likes combining notebooks with cut and paste wizardry.

Brad Fisher is a mixed-media portrait artist who uses plain Moleskine notebooks to sketch his compositions. The new platform, he says, “provides an honest marriage between creativity and commerce.”

the artists at work, and their work

The Moleskine Artist Marketplace

Attention all Amazon prime users. Instantly watch hit movies and TV shows, in HD, on your computer or on your TV.

[Amazon Instant Video]