Richard shows us the grounds of Britannia Manor, an elaborate house combining the teenage fantasies of like five separate breeds of boy.
This hectare of fine East Tennessean woodland is home to the nation's oldest and largest open-air collection of rotting corpses.
Michael Davidson takes pictures of teeny tiny living and non-living cells through a high-powered microscope.
While his colleagues are taking their cues from the more "sophisticated" side of sci-fi like Phillip K. Dick and THX-1138, Sankai has thrown out any pretense of goodwill.
Juan Manuel Gallegos has spent the past 30 years devising and building and test-flying a full stable of rocket-powered conveyances in the backyard.
Checking in on the morality of brain transplants with the pope.
If you were in 2050, you'd have transcended human consciousness by now. Today on VBS, Ray Kurzweil tells us about his vision of the Singuarlity-a point around 2045 when computers will acquire full-blown artificial intelligence and technology will infuse itself with biology. His theories have all sorts of supporters, detractors, and critics, but do you even remember what life was like before three-year-olds had cell phones and you actually had to remember facts instead of relying on the internet? That was only 10 years ago. If Kurzweil is right, we'll have supercomputers more powerful than every human brain on the planet combined within a few decades.Despite being perceived as an extreme optimist, Kurzweil is the first to admit that this technology could very quickly bring an end to the world as we know it. Stuff like gray goo is a concern, but a biological terrorist attack could happen tomorrow that is based on the very same type of technology he touts as the harbingers of the unimaginable future. He believes we'll exist in a permanent virtual/"real"-reality hybrid. It makes us think about future people spending all day auto-mastubrating to polygons with the genital equivalent of the Power Glove. But we're sick like that, and if Ray is right unenlightened pigs like us won't be around in 40 years. Everyone will be hyper-intelligent, shapeshifting nonbiological humans who can live forever. It's a bummer, a blessing, and a mind-fuck all at the same time. That's about as much as we can explain on our own. Unless you're really religious or dumb, watch on to have your brain melted. Once you're done, check out Vice magazine's interview with Ray Kurzweil in our Technology Issue to get socked over the head with more insights from the Great Beyond. And if you're still jonesing for more Kurzweil, be sure to catch the new documentary Transcendent Man, premiering in late April. As always, you can head over to Dell Lounge for even more supplemental material. ROCCO CASTORO
Tatsuya Matsui wants to make his robotic children part of your everday life.
Serving as referee and scorekeeper to the world's gamers is only a sideline to Walter Day's real interest: Transcendental Meditation
Colombian drug traffickers up the ante with homemade coke-smuggling submarines.
Bringing music down to the microsound level.
The man who created Brazil's crazy space-age moon-capital. In the 1950s, Brazil decided it would be a perfectly reasonable idea to move the capital to the center of the country's interior plateau (read: nowhere). To facilitate this sensible endeavor they enlisted Oscar Niemeyer - an ardent communist and proponent of modern architecture who, alongside his buddy Le Corbusier, had co-designed the UN building in New York - to build a crazy spacepod city in the middle of the planalto. Brasilia provided Niemeyer the perfect template to test out all the theoretical business he and his modernist colleagues had been cooking up for the past two decades. Together with urban planner Luis Costa, he designed a functionally integrated city full of massive concrete mushroom buildings and swooping aluminum spires and twisty overpasses and skyways and symbolic edifices and designated "sectors" where no one would ever have to watch out for traffic or wait at a stoplight. It's basically the bastard child of Alphaville and Albany, NY, and to this day remains a benchmark in what we really hope the future is going to look like. It also sealed his reputation as one of the century's most influential architects and certainly its most inlfuential Brazilian. Then an anti-communist military junta seized control of the country and kicked him out. For more about Niemeyer, go to delllounge.com
Ralph Lundsten's recording studio is its own country.
The warped, cyberdelic art-gadgets of Moscow's Electroboutique.
Damnhur's tree house villagers refuse to hurt a tree, but manage to keep modern amenities like electricity, internet, and a wood burning stove.
telarc is not interested in explaining what he is. On this edition of Motherboard, VBS meets Stelarc, a Greek weirdo who lives in Australia and has been screwing with his body in the furtherance of art, technology, and cyborg rights.
Mexicans conquer the last bastion of US/Japanese superiority: competitive robotics.
Finally, a virtual reality system you walk around in like some kind of giant man-hamster.
A hovel of MIT grads embark on a Red Bull and cigarette-fueled robotics bender.
Jesus Mendoza is a Texan plagued with electro-sensitivity. Basically the condition fries his body from the inside out when he comes in contact with objects emitting electro-magnetic radiation (everything from cell phones to plasma TVs). Mendoza's electro-sensitivity is an anomalous curse, forcing him to spend his life as far from power lines and generators as he can get. The medical community may not recognize his ailment, but it's hard to brush off claims from a guy whose torso looks lightly cooked. The story will feed into the paranoid delusions of technophobes everywhere.
Sosolimited is a crew of MIT grads turned audio visual artists – Eric Gunther, Justin Manor and John Rothenberg – with backgrounds in physics, architecture, computer science, media arts and music. They say that TV is garbage – and they want to turn that shit into gold. So they create live remixes of broadcasts using pure information to filter and direct the look and feel of their videos: deconstructing the 2008 presidential debates by using word-count as an aesthetic variable, for example. "Essentially what we're trying to do is like take the television studio and turn up the acid," Rothenberg says.
In the late 60s, Brian Jarvis (a British man with funny hair) invented a cheap, handheld synthesizer that plays by running a little electronic pen across a little keyboard. Despite sounding like a musical greeting card that's been through the microwave a couple times, the Stylophone captured the imagination of some of the era's most notable musical weirdoes, among them a young David Bowie and even younger Ralf Hutter of Kraftwerk, and did pretty decent business until its discontinuation in 1980. In this English edition of Motherboard, we meet up with the Stylophone's creator, some of its recent revivalists like Little Boots and the Stylophone Orchestra of Great Britain, and try to figure out how this plucky little box sealed its place in the pantheon of great, obnoxious instruments. If only the same could be said for its stillborn brother, the wobble-board.
VBS explores CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, to determine whether its 17 miles of tubing buried under the Franco-Swiss border will reveal the origin of mass in the universe – or generate an earth-devouring black hole. (We share a condescending chortle with the proton-smashing scientists about the concerns of the scientific illiterate).
NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), the first graduate school for alternative media, brings together artists, musicians, geeks, seven different types of nerd and assorted weirdos, and challenges them to do amazing things with technology. During our visit we saw a piano that gets you drunk, a drum machine made from automatic car locks, two different painting robots, and one project that finally combined the worlds of DJing and plate spinning.
Motherboard takes a stroll down the block to Holy Ghost!'s home studio where we conduct a massive drool-sesh over their cache of analog gear.
Most people who know JD Samson know her as the awesome, pubestachio'd beat-maker for the once-sorely-missed and now-thrillingly- reunited Le Tigre. A select few are also fans of her recent electro project, MEN; a selecter few remember her collaboration with Brendan Fowler, New England Roses, and the befuddling, barcode-ridden cover of their one album; and a selectest few of all have had their lives touched by her work in Dykes Can Dance, a charitable volunteer group dedicated to sharing the gift of ass-moving with the unfortunates of New York's dance-impoverished lesbian scene. While some may naysay the wide-reaching social impact of her efforts, we too share JD's belief in the "radical potential of dance music," and look forward to the day when a statue of her and her synths takes its rightful place in New York's parks system alongside Mahatma Ghandi and Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Adora Svitak, a 12 year-old prodigy who has been declared "the most clever child in the world," is the host of our new Motherboard series. Adora learned to read at three and published her first novel when she was seven. Today she sees herself as an "educator, poet and humanitarian." In this episode of Motherboard, Adora's first assignment is to interview SETI astronomer Jill Tarter about her search for intelligent extra-terrestrial life.
Mark Pauline is the founder of Survival Research Laboratories, a mythical moniker among weird-techies, art-punks and general violence seekers across the globe. Pauline began his work in the 80s in the San Francisco punk and art scene defacing billboards and organizing public pranks. Through the decades, he has become a pioneer in technological and performance arts. His vaguely anthropomorphic creations are some of the most dangerous machines ever made, rivaling the military, but instead of turning their threats on us, the machines blow each other up and let us watch.
Motherboard host Jordan Redaelli hangs out with Moby while he shows him all of his drum machines. Moby dorks out big time.
Electric Independence visits Philadelphia DJsician Ramble John "RJ" Krohn, better known as RJD2. RJ takes us for a tour of his multiple drum kits and massive modular synths. Despite the success of his solo material on Def Jux, producing for every independent rapper under the sun, and his recent, poppier work on XL Recordings, RJ insists that he has no chops. Yeah, he went to music school. Big deal. It's not like going to school's automatically going to give a guy an infusion of chops. He's a messy 13 year-old experimenter and that's how he likes it, shredders and virtuosos be damned. The proof is in the cobblers, which he generously cooked up for us and even dusted them with cinnamon!
In this episode, we travel to New Hampshire to hang out with Ralph Baer. He tells us about his past and how he came to be one of the most important figures in video gaming history.
This week on Motherboard Cory Arcangel invites us into his Brooklyn studio to give us a peek behind-the-scenes to see how his clever brand of Youtube-infused digital art gets made. For the last ten years, Cory's been the rare sort of guy who can work extensively with technology without losing his creative intuition or being broken by the cold boringness that traps so many others in the medium. As one of the very few art-world savants who views the raw beauty contained in a video mash-up, we ask for and receive a run down of his favorite internet videos. He also briefs us on everything from his earliest work to the infamous "Mario Clouds" and on through his enlightened treatise on jpeg compression and his recreation of Arnold Schoenberg's 1999 op. 11 Drei Klavierstücke comprised entirely of Youtube cats playing piano.
Wasilla, "real America" Alaska is more than just Sarah Palin's stomping ground and a natural-gas haven. Wasilla's also the hometown of Carlos Owens, a man whose 20-foot robotic exoskeleton has flamethrower hands. An Air Force transplant and amateur inventor, Carlos makes the machines for which our inner seven year-olds never stop begging. While both his Hover Bike and Sky Bike need a few kinks worked out, but for a guy who draws blueprints in chalk on his driveway, Carlos' progress is astounding.
Eddy Moretti goes to the home of Josh Tickell and his fiancé Rebecca Harrell to discuss the slow rise and drastic fall of the green-movement they helmed. Along the way, we learn some of the science behind sustainable energy Josh and Rebecca picked up on the road. Josh Tickell is America's biodiesel guru. He introduced the concept to the US when he famously drove his "veggie-van" around the country, fueling it with used cooking oil. He wrote the first book on how-to-make-your-own biodiesel, and is wrapping up his 11-years-in-the-making documentary FUEL about his journey.
Cody R Wilson has figured out how to print a semi-automatic rifle from the comfort of his own home. Now he's putting all the information online so that others will join him.
A MOTHERBOARD documentary on life, death, and an unassuming Mexican dentist whose proprietary chemical formula can restore corpses for identification.
Motherboard investigates the new space race-one fueled not by countries trying to plant a flag on the Moon, but by explorers looking to get rich on Mars and beyond.
In the series premiere, the safety of smart guns is discussed.
The Zika virus throws a spotlight on the endless battle to fight pandemics; a fight with a new front, deep under the sea.
A plastic surgeon who shares the details of surgeries is profiled.
Hackers aren't just looking to steal your bank account. Everything around you can be hacked.
Prosthetics are more advanced and useful than ever, leading to a new frontier of human augmentation.
In the Season 1 finale, physics rules everything, but it still can't explain everything.
Rhianna Lakin is the force behind the leading online community for women interested in drones. She’s proactively carved out a space for women in a male domin ated industry and is challenging drone pilots everywhere to use the technology for good. She’s hoping to use drones as a powerful tool to expose and combat d eforestation, aid in search and rescue missions and humanitarian relief, amplify the voices of protesters and inspire the next generation to do the same.
Pinball was once an American obsession. Now, the arcade classic is making a comeback, but the repair technicians skilled enough to repair these complex machines are limited. In this episode of State of Repair, Motherboard talks to two remaining pinball repair techs in New York to see what goes into keeping these highly specialized games running.
Douglas McCauley is a Santa Barbara-based marine scientist who is looking to technology for new ways to take on some of the ocean's biggest challenges. Along with his colleagues at the Benioff Ocean Initiative (BOI)—a UCSB-based collaboration between marine biologists, tech innovators, and citizen scientists—McCauley has helped develop numerous platforms to monitor threats to marine ecosystems.
When it comes to repair, farmers have always been self reliant. But the modernization of tractors and other farm equipment over the past few decades has left most farmers in the dust thanks to diagnostic software that large manufacturers hold a monopoly over. In this episode of State of Repair, Motherboard goes to Nebraska to talk to the farmers and mechanics who are fighting large manufacturers like John Deere for the right to access the diagnostic software they need to repair their tractors.
Every year there’s a race to become the first to tear down the phone, with teams from around the world flying to Australia—where it’s first released—to compete to be the first to look inside the world’s most coveted new phone. Motherboard embedded with iFixit, a California-based company whose primary mission is to make it easier for the average person to disassemble and repair their electronics, for its iPhone X teardown.
Every month for the past five years, Harlem residents have gathered to discuss digital privacy and how to best protect themselves from intrusive surveillance. Motherboard joined CryptoHarlem founder Matthew Mitchell at one of his crypto parties to see firsthand how he is empowering people of color, who he says are over-policed and heavily surveilled.
Living With Jaguars is a 360° film documenting wild jaguars in Brazil. Part documentary and part immersive game, Living With Jaguars explores historical and current tensions in a rural region where jaguars prey on ranchers' cattle and ranchers kill them in retaliation. Now, ranchers and jaguars must find new ways to co-exist - or risk the future of a species under threat.
Plattsburgh, NY is part of a long-standing power agreement that gives the city an allotment of some of the cheapest electricity anywhere in the world, but a recent influx of cryptomining companies and their energy-draining rigs have raised power prices at the expense of the general population.