dazed & approved

TECH
Gadget of the Month: foc.us Forget augmenting reality with Google Glass: how about headgear that supes up your brainpower? The first consumerready cyberpunk kit will be available from late July as foc.uS rolls out its transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tCDS) headset. The premise is slightly shocking you clamp electrodes to your scalp and apply a mild electrical current (between 0.8 and 2.0 milliamps) across your frontal lobes to gain a boost in concentration and improve your learning abilities. For the quantifiedself junkie seeking quickfire ways to eke more performance bandwidth from their brain there is obvious appeal. But its not just fringe self-hackers that have taken an interest in this technology: there is legit academic research probing this method of brain boosting. The US governments militarytechnology agency Darpa is seeking to augment sniper marksmanship through the same technology. Text Stephen Fortune order.foc.us

Internet Explorer: Jer Thorp Jer Thorpe is a data-viz virtuoso with professorial duties in New York Universitys ITP programme. He is co-founder of multidisciplinary data-research group The Office for Creative Research. He took time off from mapping the three million daily lightning strikes into a data visualisation and prepping for a six-month project with MoMA in Manhattan to pick three favourite examples of data viz... US Gun Deaths by Periscopic (guns. periscopic.com) This deftly handled visualisation is a poetic take on a difficult statistic. The choice of years lost as a measure really brings a lot of power to the piece.

First Exposure: Heidi Lee Design alchemist Heidi Lee is a scientific milliner: her unique take on headwear is infused by an interest in technology, science and magic. She sees the mind as a gateway into holographic simulations, and aims to heighten awareness of the potential magic wrapped inside the head. What subjects are inspiring your millinery right now? Pataphysics, theosophy and orgone energy. Subjects Ive had no formal education in spark my curiosity and creation. Tell us about your Singularity hat. What does it do? For a while, I was grappling with the idea of what singularity was after watching Transcendent Man, the documentary about (futurist/ inventor) Ray Kurzweil. In an effort to literally wrap my head around the concept, I designed hats that fuse a biological primal print with a technological motherboard print: disparate entities locked into a single lenticular hologram. The Singularity hats, a collaboration with creative technologist Hanny Ahern, mimic the behaviour of neurons flickering in a brain and data being processed on a computer chip via LEDs programmed to blink on and off by radio frequencies. What other mad inventions can we find in your studio? The Third Eye hat is made of photopolymer and rainbow holograms. The Cocktail Parasol hat is a 3D-printed piece, made of nylon. What they have in common is that they both require precision lasers to come into being. The Atomic Universe hat features kinetic LED lights that swirl around your head like electrons orbiting the nucleus of an atom. Text Veronica So heidi337.tumblr.com

Event of the Month: OHM2013 A five-day festival of phreaking, hacking and making is about to unfold in the Netherlands under the OHM2013 banner in the Netherlands. The work hard, play hard ethos of all those identifying as hackers is readily in evidence. On one side of the festival will be Rainbow Island, a tarpaulinensconced arcade-gaming village that doubles up as a BYOB (bring your own beamer!) projection canvas at night, while during the day the infosec elite will be getting down to srs business. Representatives from iconic hackerspace Noisebridge and digital-rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation will debate the ethics and scope of cyber activism against a backdrop of soapbox presentations from former spooks from MI5, the NSA (good timing!), the FBI and CIA. Text Stephen Fortune July 31August 4, Geestmerambacht, The Netherlands. ohm2013.org

Wind Map by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg (hint.fm/wind) During Hurricane Sandy, I refreshed this page over and over again to watch the colossal spiral of winds as it approached my Brooklyn apartment. OneTrees by Nathalie Jerimijenko (nyu. edu/projects/xdesign/onetrees) Ten years on, this project is still every bit as powerful. Nathalie Jerimijenko made 1,000 identical clones of a single tree in 1999, 20 pairs of which she later planted around the Bay Area to act as a living visualisation of air and soil conditions. Text Stephen Fortune

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