Lego is one of the most simple, but also most re-usable toy, that has friends among all ages. This week I found two two very interesting projects from literally grown-ups, that still are very passionate about those colored plastic-bricks.

E-Klocki is a weblog, completely dedicated to Lego. “Klocki” is the Polish word for “Brick”. And they do claim their passion: “Lego Bricks for Adults”. The designs they feature in the blog are very advanced, both in the choice of bricks, techniques, topics, as well as the colorful and architectural choices they made. The really developed their own style and sometimes I have to think on eBoy when looking at their work. This is where you can get, if you live your passion upon just one thing.

Some fresh designs from e-klocki.com.

People still having fun playing with those colorful bricks, no matter if young or old. Sometimes the amount of bricks and colors is just impressing. Sydney Architecture Studio “Super Colossal” reported about The City of the Future, a huge city model at the Sydney Architecture Festival. It was something like a “city model to work on, play with and modify”, made of thousands of mesmerizing Lego bricks. No wonder, that it had the power to attract the people.

“The City of the Future” at the Sydney Architecture Festival 2008.

Yesterday I found this video of a 3D-sketching system research. Is it good or not? It could be one of this “research studies” that are fine on the first view, but not suitable to the everyday use. On the other hand does this system really look promising. Drawing and editing is really pure, fluid and you work always on the canvas – a little like working with pen and paper. The study was made by a research group of the Dynamic Graphics Project at the University of Toronto.

This is Toroko “old” and “new”.

This is sweet and interesting to look at. The Cave Story will be ported to the Wii and the characters will be slightly powered up. As you can see on the picture, the number of pixel doubled, in order to enhance the detail level. The sweet thing is, that, according to Infendo, you will have the option to play the new or the original pixelset of the characters at the Wii version of Cave Story. Thumbs up again for Nintendo. Get all details at the Nicalis-blog.

Generally spoken: Doubling the number of pixels is a very interesting technique to design sprites and characters I think. Even to use it systematically. Start with a white square. ;)

The RJDJ is an iPhone application, that will turn your life into an interactive musicvideo. It plays music, that will be modified by sensory input. In other words you have music, that reacts to sensory and environmental input. It makes use of different sensors, like the microphone, the acceleration sensor and the touchpad. RJDJ turns your mobile phone into a very complex mixture of music playing device, music instrument or reality shaping artifact. The creators say about it, that it is “like glasses for your ears”. They are right. Not only for them the RJDJ is a “digital drug”.

The application therefore does not “play music”, but reacts to “scenes”. That’s why they call the patches for the app “scenes”. You can write your own stuff with the help of Pure Data. The people who made this possible come from or live all over the place: Austria, France, Spain, New Zealand, Switzerland, Germany… Thanks Frank for the info!

Get your trip and all other information at the RJDJ-Website. There is a introduction and also a site for downloading scenes.

See how to play and jam with it:

At Post Spectacular I found the link to an interesting work of computer generated art. Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter edited a huge fake book. The pdf-file consist of 3785 pages full of poems, that were made by computer, but credits are given to real poem authors. I don’t know if ever a real book was made, but imagine… over 3700 (or 1850) pages! What a big pile of paper.

The computer generated poems itself look good. They feel somehow natural – like poems. I can’t say anything about the artistic quality itself, because I am really not into the art of poems and never was. But the fact that 3700 poems, from authors I never heard of, just come into one book, would really make me suspicious. The cover of the book is labeled “Issue1″. So are the guys planning another one?

You can download the book here, or directly as pdf.

Meat Boy is great a independent game. You play a “juicy piece of meat”, that has to save a girl in each level. The story and the gameplay feels really oldschool, and in fact it is. What makes the game so great is not only the gameplay, but foremost the blissful graphic and the excellent leveldesign, that is really in the neigbourhood of oldschool-arcade games from the 8- and 16-bit era.

You can play Meat Boy online, or download the package on your windows-machine. The games was made by Edmund McMillen and Jonathan McEntee. Plus: there is also a leveleditor on board. Happy sharing.

The Space Invaders project is one of the most enthusiastic streetart projects worldwide. It is around since years, leaving signs in almost all metropolitan areas in the world so far. The latest work was from this mysterious guy was made at the museumsquartier in Vienna. The invaders there are really impressive, how I can tell from the pictures. If you’ve been there… take some pictures, upload them and post them into the comments if you like. Check out the official pictures.