Play with us!

thisissand.com is a website for play. It changes the pixels on the screen into digital sand that can be used as building material for cosmic landscapes, Clemens-style sand paintings, mandalas and so on.

This is a joint project of the designers Johanna Lundberg and Jenna Sutela with the Flash programmer Timo Koro. We wanted to create a playground of colours and sound for people to play with us in our sandbox – within the computer screen.

The digital sandbox on thisissand.com takes after the physical one. The user is allowed to do what he or she wishes with the elements in the sandbox. Sometimes the resulting pieces are expressive, sometimes they become more abstract. And just as a real world sandbox, the one on thisissand.com can be smoothed out and re-sculpted again time after time.

Just like the actual sand gets its colour from its origins, the sand used on thisissand.com covers the RGB palette natural to digital environments. Also the sounds of the falling sand on thisissand.com resemble a real life phenomenon: singing sand is discovered in about 35 desert locations around the world where the wind triggers a low-pitch sound in the natural sand. Instead of nature’s frequencies the digital sand generates white noise, which is a random signal with a flat power density. It is considered analogous to white light which contains all frequencies – like the RGB sand on thisissand.com.

The specialities of the digital sand lie in the possibility of saving the original pieces of sand art in the gallery or printing them out. thisissand.com can also be used year-round, anywhere and anytime. The sand doesn’t fall or wear out.

We are adopting the Fluxus attitude and experimenting with perceived connections between everyday artefacts, intermediality, art and play. There is no such thing as a linear plot or a particular set of expectations on thisissand.com: it is a place for recreation and fun, and an eternal work in progress.

Contact us at thisissand@gmail.com!

Saved!

In April, we asked for your help in keeping the sandbox online. Thank you for the donations!

Now, we are officially saved as the hosting of thisissand.com is kindly supported by FinnishDesignShop, our favourite online retailer of Finnish design products.

Featuring both the classics of Finnish design as well as the most interesting new products, FinnishDesignShop also presents a handpicked selection of other Scandinavian design. The shop is located in Finland, but it offers worldwide delivery.

thisissand.com in print

The modern lifestyle store My o My in Helsinki recently played host to a thisissand.com exhibition in their store with large-scale prints.

Save thisissand.com!

Help! by Marco Knock

After the release of the site in May 2008, the gallery on thisissand.com has constantly expanded with sand images refining one after another towards technical and visual totality. We treasure every bit of your output from private love messages to artistic and political statements. However, the hosting costs are up over our ears and the three of us need your help to keep the sandbox online. If you like us, please make a PayPal donation!

“Everybody to the mountains!”

Mountains of sand have been spotted on Le Corps Mince de Françoise’s MySpace profile. In addition to the up and coming pop outfit from Helsinki, our timeless favourite Creative Review featured thisissand.com among Johanna’s beautiful illustrations for ME magazine in their September 2008 issue.

Miltos Manetas

A big thank you to Miltos Manetas for mentioning us on the Saatchi Gallery website as one of the highlights of 2008:

Two designers and a programmer (Lundberg, Sutela & Koro) made this digital mandala tool which is so close to art that if they will not agree to sell it to the Manetas Collection, I will simply appropriate it and put it up there as my own artwork. “A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever” – that is what distinguishes design from an artwork and this website is definitely “a Thing of Beauty”.

Upload bug fix

First of all, huge apologies for everybody trying to upload drawings without luck. We feel really bad for knowing how much time and effort many of you have put into drawing pieces, and then not been able to get them submitted for everyone to see.

We recently discovered that changes in the most recent Adobe Flash Player security model had broken our upload tool. So all of you who have updated to Flash Player 10, have not been able upload their drawings in thisissand.com. The matter has been fixed now, and if you reload (first clear browser cache) thisissand.com, you should be able to upload without problems.

Once again, apologies to everyone, and thank you for all the great feedback and wonderful drawings!

Best,

Timo / thisissand.com

It’s not us

We’re guest blogging this week on itsnicethat.com. Follow our blog posts on a selection of favourite interactive projects!

Private view in London this coming Thursday

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’ll be exhibiting thisissand.com at DegreeArt in east London this week as part of their New Media Week. The private view is on Thursday 23rd October between 6-9pm, and it’d be great to meet you if you’re around!

thisissand.com at Show 100

Welcome to Show 100, the main event of Helsinki Design Week at Cable Factory! A special standalone version of thisissand.com is on display from Wednesday to Friday, October 1-3, 2008.

Bug/feature fixed!

As you might have noticed, we have updated our sand application, and it no longer has the bug/feature of being able to draw “on top of sand”. It wasn’t actually planned to be there, and it didn’t really fit the concept either, so we fixed it.

Some people were quick enough to use their creativity with it in many interesting ways, and thus we definitely want to keep those pieces in the gallery, even if we have a reason to believe that some of them were achieved with a little bit of help from programmable mouse pointer scripts…