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my name is james powderly and i'm a
designer
somewhere between maybe an artist and an
engineer
over the last two years or so i've been
traveling around and doing art shows all
over the world
i was on a course to become an
under-qualified
corporate aerospace engineer i've worked
on two projects for nasa that eventually
found their way to mars one was the
phoenix lander and then the first one
was the mars exploration rover we made
the thing that grinds into the planet
mars
and i think i could have kept doing it
and i did enjoy a lot of aspects of it
at the same time there was a guy who'd
never met evan roth on his way to being
a cubicle
work a day guy but he quit his job like
i quit my job in aerospace engineering
and we both got residency in this place
called ibeam
the idea was the creative technology lab
where you could come and work on your
own projects somewhere between new media
art and mit sort of super genius lab
so
one of us said well
you know if you just took one of those
leds and you stuck a magnet on it and
you stuck a battery in it you'd have
like one pixel and we went we made one
we went outside and threw it up on the
high line
we thought that kind of works but
obviously this has to be done in mass to
be interesting
we kind of put them all together
picked out a building that was right
next to i-beam and we went out and threw
these on
by the end of the night there were like
30 people tossing them up including like
security guards and bouncers from the
bar next door
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but as we got deeper into graffiti we
aligned ourselves much more with
graffiti riders than street art
we've made a prototype it works a
project called laser tag
which basically allows you to take like
just a normal off-the-shelf consumer
projector
a cctv camera
and a laptop and combine those together
with a green laser pointer so
it looks like you're drawing on a
building
laser tag kind of popped us out a little
bit you know we got to go and travel
around the world and meet a lot of
interesting people
one of those people was named tony quan
and he's also called tempt
he really innovated
the la graffiti scene
but he was diagnosed with als which is a
degenerative neuromuscular disease
basically all the voluntary muscles in
his body have slowly stopped responding
to his commands or any commands
so this includes his ability to talk his
ability to move his arms but um his mind
is 100 intact and this creative energy
is still
kicking you know he can also move his
eyes
if someone can make a computer that you
can use with your eyes and these guys
can make graffiti on the side of
buildings that involves a computer they
should be able to make something for
this guy we went out to la
spent 10 days on the project kind of
developed a prototype
first i look at my eye that's been
captured in this camera
when i focus on a certain position it
makes a point
then i can drag the line in order to
create a line
and then create shapes
then i can create a number of letters
combine them all together to make a word
and then do things like
add 3d effects add shading
fill in the background stuff like this
and then on the last night of
that first 10-day development
session
tony kwon wrote for the first time in
seven years using his eyes
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foreign
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