arts

Electronic Arts' latest tool to keep The Simpsons: Tapped Out iOS game from becoming a zombie app: actual zombies.

In anticipation of The Simpsons' annual Treehouse of Horror episode, EA updated its Farmville-like game to include Halloween-themed landscapes such as a cemetery, complete with zombies and zombie pets that can infect the characters in your game. The addition adds a new wrinkle to the game, and breathes new life in for players who were done buying buildings and likely on the verge of burning out.

With the upgrade, EA made good on its promise to continue supporting The Simpsons: Tapped … Read more

One artist sees treasure in trashed keyboards of yesteryear.

Inspired by the tale of ancient Greece's infamously sneaky Trojan Horse and humankind's Internet gluttony, German artist Babis Pangiotidis created an elaborate model of a rocking horse known as "Hedonism(y) Trojaner" with skin made of thousands of forgotten keyboard keys. Babis states on his portfolio site that the shades of color found on the recycled keys range from ivory white to nicotine-stained yellow. … Read more

The International Symposium on Electronic Art came to New Mexico for 2012 to show off the intersection of art, nature, and technology under the theme of "Machine Wilderness."

For two weeks, the notable art corridor between Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos played host to ISEA with a full schedule of panels, keynotes, performances, and all sorts of interesting and interactive art installations. … Read more

I love baking. I love technology. I just never thought to put the two together. Israel-based artist and designer Debbi Nitsan, however, is already on the case.

Nitsan created an entire collection of electronics with their original casings removed and replaced with new, 100 percent more delicious, bread casings. The items include clocks, radios, and flashlights.… Read more

The mundane task of turning on the lights generally involves a simple flick of the switch, but Norwegian designer Stian Korntved Ruud thinks it could get a lot more interesting.

Korntved Ruud, who graduated last year with a master's in industrial design from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, created "Circuit breaker," a series of five switches that force users to interact with the panel and thus present new ways of turning the lights on.… Read more

Italian artist Leonardo Ulian's mesmerizing piece "Technological mandala 02," doesn't look like the average sacred art commonly seen in Buddhism and Hinduism.

Ulian, based in London, created the mandala with hundreds of microchips, circuits, resistors, and other components found within everyday electronics.… Read more

For some people, old circuit boards and computer components needlessly fill up space, awaiting a proper sendoff to the electronics recycling facility. Italian artist Franco Recchia sees opportunity in those old parts, though, and instead creates fascinating miniature city skylines with the pieces of forgotten technology.

The artist covers an array of major cities, including New York, Chicago, Detroit, and more. In an interview with the Agora art gallery, Recchia reveals that he often finds parts in "trash heaps" and that it takes four different styles of welding to make the techno cities. … Read more

Many denizens of the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley noticed a long series of cloudy numbers in the skies around noon on Wednesday, September 12. No, their coffee wasn't spiked with hallucinogens.

The ephemeral event, known as Pi in the Sky, utilized five aircraft with dot-matrix skywriting technology to write out a thousand numbers of the beloved mathematical constant pi (3.14159..) at a 10,000-foot altitude. If that wasn't impressive enough, the numerals of pi written in the sky each stood nearly a quarter-mile tall, stretched for a 100-mile loop, and undoubtedly caused mass inspiration and confusion all at once. … Read more

As rumors of a big-screen iPhone 5 intensified late last month, engineers at the read-it-later app Pocket went into hacking mode, scouring the Internet for ways to tweak the iPhone's official software development kit so they could redesign their app for a bigger screen.

Ever since Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June, widespread speculation has held that the next iPhone would boast a 4-inch screen. For hundreds of thousands of developers, that posed a potential problem: Would their apps look strange on a bigger screen? And how would they build mock-ups when the official iOS simulator showed the … Read more