Skip to main content

Don’t you wish you’d thought of using tricycles to create this animated street art?

animated street art projector tricycle screen shot 2015 11 02 at 6 26 36 pm
Image used with permission by copyright holder
They say that good art moves you, but in some cases, great art literally moves. And one of those cases can be found in the dynamic duo of Ygor Marotta and Ceci Soloaga, artists based in São Paulo, Brazil. In a brilliantly whimsical move, the two have created animated street art by riding through the streets of cities across the world with projectors attached to their tricycles. But these are no ordinary tricycles — rather, they’re turned into machines of pure imagination when outfitted with a projector, batteries, speaker, and computer.

By pedaling through different towns and taking advantage of their natural (and manmade) surroundings, Marotta and Soloaga are able to create interactive, larger than life narratives in which cats walk on walls and whole building facades are transformed into a vortex of colors. Titled “Suaveciclos,” It’s an interesting juxtaposition of the imaginary with reality — while the settings of these art projects are made of brick and mortar (or leaf and branch, etc. etc.) the projected characters turn even the most familiar places into living and breathing storybooks.

This project, the artists note on their website, allows them to “communicate with people through drawings, animations and poetry.” A team since 2009, the two have since created four short moviesTrip (2013) La cena (2012), Homeless (2011), and Run (2011). Starting with their hand-drawn artwork, these pieces were then “transformed into digital animation, then using project techniques,” allowed to “fly and run across the urban landscape, fusing an animated story with real life.”

“Using Tagtool app for drawing and animating live, together with 20,000 lumens projectors,” the team explains on their website, “We do video mapping [mixed] with live drawings, and create a colorful canvas in big scale walls.”

Thus far, citizens of Russia, Luxemburg, Slovakia, Germany, and Brazil have had the distinct pleasure of seeing these performances, all of which are necessarily performed live and in real time.

Of course, if you haven’t had the opportunity to see Marotta and Soloaga’s work, you can check out one of their many videos and experience the magic secondhand. But this seems like one art exhibit worth making the trek to see.

Ygor Marotta and Ceci Soloaga designed audiovisual tricycles that project animations… (Vine by @nowthisnews) https://t.co/5wLceFdLJs

— Kishau Smith Rogers (@kishau) October 13, 2015

Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more