The gadgets of yesterday are often turned into the art of today, and this concept is carried out delightfully in the art of Hu Shaoming. He uses technological relics of the early 20th century to show the internal beauty of the objects’ working parts.

“Reconnecting Time” is a series of four objects: a 1910s telephone, a 1920s alarm clock, a 1930s camera, and a 1940s portable film camera. Each has been painstakingly disassembled.

The artist then reconstructed every piece with a stationary zipper. Rather than pulling apart and putting together pieces of the objects, the zippers serve to reveal their inner mechanisms.

Although the zippers don’t move, they connect the antique gadgets with the present day. They allow for a glimpse into the mechanical parts that made each of the items work – a view that we don’t usually get until we deconstruct an object.

According to the artist, the pieces use the zippers as hands to pull the gadgets from the beginning of industrial age into the present. He destroyed their original forms and then carefully pieced them back together to create something that is neither firmly in the past or the present.

The post Persistence of Time: Antique Gadgets Unzipped for Art first appeared on Gajitz.

Ancient humans had no choice but to figure out how to use the raw materials around them to accomplish essential tasks. As modern people, we have the luxury of choosing from a variety of pre-made tools that even come with instructions for use. Designers Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow taught themselves to make ancient tools and then used modern techniques to give the tools specific defined purposes.

The stone hand-axe is a prehistoric tool that was used for a very wide variety of purposes. It would have functioned as a weapon, a food preparation tool, an animal-skinning blade, and a number of other uses – but it would have had the same form when being used for all of these purposes.

Drach and Ganchrow used 3D printing to add parts onto hand-axes that would give each a specific purpose and make them easier to use. The “Man Made” project added plastic pieces to flint tools to create a spear, a clip-on belt to store a throwing weapon, a cutting/slicing tool, a tripod display case, a chisel, a digging tool, and a swinging axe-like tool.

By defining each hand tool, the duo narrowed the number of things the hand-axes could be used for but also made them easier to do those newly-defined jobs. They now have a luxury that ancient humans never had and would be shocked to see: a comfortable way to perform necessary tasks with simplistic tools.

The Man Made project combines old and new technology and points out the stark contrasts between the two. Simple pieces of sharpened flint are exceptionally primitive, while the digital mapped and 3D printing add-ons are decidedly 21st century. Who would have thought they could come together to form tools that are not only useful but strangely beautiful?

The post Gilded Butterflies: Ancient Tools Get 21st Century Upgrades first appeared on Gajitz.

We tend to think of mobile phones as a purely modern invention, but here’s a fact that will blow your modern mind: more than 1.5 million people were using mobile phones in 1964. Sure, they weren’t the streamlined mini versions we enjoy today. They weren’t even as small or as portable as those awful bag phones of the 80s. But they were mobile, and they worked.

There were no cellular networks back then, of course – these monsters used radio bandwidth. The car-mounted stone-age phones were so energy intensive that the headlights of the cars they were in dimmed visibly when the phones were in use. They reached an impressive amount of users considering their high price, hefty weight and somewhat unreliable technology. But then again, so did the first handheld cell phones of the following decade.

The post Beautiful History: Massive Radio Wave Carphones of the 60s first appeared on Gajitz.