Teeny Stuff

Structures and sculptures that are tiny in scale are engaging: dioramas, miniatures, dollhouses, models, snow globes, terrariums ... I think it's because of the range of responses they can create in the observer: on one hand, they can draw you in to a new miniature parallel world ... on the other, they can make you feel like an outside entity: completely removed and all-perceiving.

Take the miniature dramatic art of Lori Nix,



Jonah Samson's (Dark and Dirty) Dioramas,



and the amazing works of Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz. They include tiny islands:



... and snow globes:



When the sculptures / structures also have a tactile component, there is an added bonus of being able to engage both your senses of sight and touch. For example, it's hard to see a snow globe without wanting to pick it up and shake it, or look at this "Room Box" of a bake shop and candy store and not want to hold one of the tiny cakes:



A closer look:





In a lot of ways, the miniature arts are limited only by the imagination.

Make the world's smallest orange,


a terrarium in a mini Tabasco bottle,


a castle inside a lightbulb diorama,


... or decorate your ceiling with a parallel world, like artist Ji Lee: "People decorate their walls and floors, but most of them overlook their ceilings. It's such a waste of vast space. So I started to install miniature parallel worlds on the ceilings."

"Feel" better

We all have a unique place in this world. Take a look at "Secret Worlds: The Universe Within" to increase your understanding of both the vastness and connectedness of the universe, and be humbled by your place in it.

Human beings use many different cues to determine our location, and all of our senses can be involved. Consider sitting in a lawn chair on the beach - you feel sand on your toes, taste and smell the salt of the ocean in the air, hear the waves crashing, and see see the sun directly overhead as you squint through your sunglasses and realize it's about lunch time.

All of our sense are very important in helping us determine our place in the world. Here, I focus on our sense of touch and how it can be used to expand an awareness of our surroundings.

Consider the "feelSpace belt", which can help you "develop an unerring sense of direction". It deepens your awareness of your location by constantly alerting you which direction is north. The belt has sensors all around it, and no matter which direction you're facing, the northernmost facing sensor will vibrate against your skin. Test subjects reported a lasting increase in spatial intelligence, because, even after they took the belt off, they were still able to sense which direction was north and had general feeling of always being able to find their way.

Over at the Ririan Project there's an article that talks about how to sharpen your senses. It provides the following examples of ways to keep your sense of touch from dulling:

If you usually barehand it when batting, putting, or serving, go gloved for your practice swings. “Placing material between your skin and what you’re gripping will force the receptors to work harder as they try to feel through the barrier,” says Tiffany Field, Ph.D., founder of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami school of medicine.

Take the gloves off for the game and you’ll get a boost in sensitivity that will give you greater control.

In the wrong hands, skin can be a blunt instrument. “Without regular stimulation, your skin receptors become less sensitive,” says Dr. Field. Sex is one source of stimulation, especially if body oil enters the equation.

But you can also get a hot-stone massage, go for a swim in bracingly cold water, or use a long-handled bristle brush instead of a wimpy washcloth. Then have more sex.

Speaking of sex, aparently, by playing video games with a lot of action, women can close the gap between the sexes in spatial skills. "On average, women are not quite as good at rapidly switching attention among different objects", say researchers at the University of Toronto. This is a suspected reason for why women (debatably) don't do as well as men on spatial tasks (i.e. reading a map, driving a car, assembling a grill). This study found that after only 10 hours of play, women caught up to men in spatial skills and the change was still present 5 months later.

We can also expand our sense of touch by using it in place of other senses, (i.e. "see with your hands") as with this art exhibition of "tactile photography".

Our sense of touch, like all of our senses is elastic and can be expanded upon more than we know. Never underestimate the power it can hold.

Hack your sense of hearing

Our sense of hearing is one of our main tools for gathering information about the world around us. And, like all of our senses, it is easy to trick. Listening to binaural recordings demonstrates this. Over at Quiet American, "Binaural Theory" is described as follows:

"The binaural recording concept is elegant: place closely-matched microphones near the ears, and record what the ears actually hear. The details may be fascinating and esoteric, but the results speak for themselves ...Consider how we are able to locate sound sources ... differences between what each ear hears provide the clues our brains need to locate sound sources in space ... Binaural recordings (are) designed to capture ('commit to tape') these differences ... The result is a subjective three-dimensional soundscape that cannot yet be equaled with conventional speaker playback."

So test out some of these 'three-dimensional soundscapes':

Don't even bother listening to any of these if you aren't going to both WEAR HEADPHONES and CLOSE YOUR EYES (no peeking!).

Nothing like a little hacking of the senses to remind us of the plasticity of the brain ...

• Get a hair cut over at the Virtual Barbershop
• Never again will you have to spend countless nights wondering what it would sound like if someone was writing on the inside of your skull
  
• Sometimes it's OK to play with matches
• And take a ride in a boat

Want to go somewhere specific?

• Go on a audio vacation, like maybe to Spain near Seville's Cathedral where you can hear this flamenco dancer's street performance
• Want to go somewhere else? Check out all the geotagged sounds from around the world at the freesound project.
  

The Interactive World of Pop-ups

I love pop-up books. There are so many things to love: whether it be the childhood nostalgia, their hacking of space through manipulation of scale and perception, an ability to transport you to another world, or their simple interactivity. Pop-ups encompass a realm of creativity and tactile awareness that is irresistible.

Take this Alice and Wonderland pop-up for example. Looking at this, I can't help but be transported to both a different time and a different world.

Something seemingly simple, like reciting the alphabet or a light can become wonderfully complex, like with the book ABC3D or Ken Ishiguro's pop-up light.

They can be a fantastic creative outlet, like this band tapped into for its music video. Or, they can increase your depth of understanding, as with these pop-ups about habitat and space or classic and modern architecture.

You can also use them to safely explore your fears (whether common phobias ... or specific to zombies, perhaps?). Or you can learn more about human anatomy, the facts of life, or sexuality.

There seem to be endless possibilities. For more examples, just check out The Fellowship of Pop-up Books, the Pop-Up Book of Celebrity Meltdowns, and the fun they had with a pop-up Photoshop contest over at Something Awful.