Tuesday, April 13. 2010
UVA: Speed of Light opens
Over the past few weeks, we've been following the production of Speed of Light, an ambitious laser light installation by United Visual Artists for Virgin Media. The show is now open and it doesn't disappoint
UVA were commissioned by Virgin Media to create 'an immersive light installation celebrating 10 years of broadband in the UK'. It comprises a series of laser-based experimental light works which flow through the labyrinthine spaces of the Bargehouse, the four-storey ex-warehouse on London's South Bank.
On entering the space, visitors are asked to speak into a suspended microphone to answer questions displayed on the wall in front of them. Their answers follow them around the building as they explore the various installations over four floors.
These sounds and others, as well as light, are carried around the building using fibre optics, thus tying in with the broadband theme.
On the first floor, is probably the most explicitly client-related piece in which lasers describe the outline of a TV set, coffee table and sofa in a living room.
Visitors' previous answers affect a giant laser-generated icon at the end of the next room – positive responses producing a happy face, negative ones a sad one.
The things get more abstract, and interesting. A spectacular light show runs the length of one room, reacting to sampled sounds, the multicoloured lasers made vibrant by the water-based haze pumped into the room - think dry ice.
The final room is more of a performance piece than an installation. Four large lasers, one on each corner of the room, react to the soundtrack of visitors' replies plus news feeds and archive audio.
A company like Virgin Media, with a corporate anniversary to celebrate, would perhaps in the past have settled for spending the money on a TV ad. Thankfully, with the aid of UVA and PR company Borkowski it has gone for something much more ambitious and memorable. Interesting too that it is a project that has come via a PR company rather than an ad agency - a sign of things to come?
This is a really beautiful piece of work – highly reommended.
Our previous posts on the project are here, here and here
Speed of Light is at the Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, South Bank, London, SE1 9PH, from April 9 to 19.
All photographs by Tom Oldham
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Pulse Room
Via BLDGBLOG
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A project I've been meaning to write about ever since seeing it in Vague Terrain #16 is "Pulse Room" by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
[Image: From "Pulse Room" by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer].
"Pulse Room," originally produced back in 2006, was an "interactive installation featuring one to three hundred clear incandescent light bulbs," the brightness of which was controlled by an interface and sensor that could detect "the heart rate of participants."
- When someone holds the interface, a computer detects his or her pulse and immediately sets off the closest bulb to flash at the exact rhythm of his or her heart. The moment the interface is released all the lights turn off briefly and the flashing sequence advances by one position down the queue, to the next bulb in the grid. Each time someone touches the interface a heart pattern is recorded and this is sent to the first bulb in the grid, pushing ahead all the existing recordings. At any given time the installation shows the recordings from the most recent participants.
The room thus becomes a counterpunctual archive of heart rates in space, throbbing like a chandelier in front of you.
[Image: From "Pulse Room" by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer].
Lozano-Hemmer later expanded this idea in scale quite significantly for his "Pulse Park" project, in which New York's Madison Square Park was temporarily illuminated by a moving, heart-rate-controlled "matrix of light beams."
But I would like to see something like "Pulse Subway," say, where long tunnels flicker off around underground curves as heartbeat-like rhythms of light beat below ground, scaling the whole thing up yet further to form a piece of urban infrastructure (or is that simply a nightclub?); or even "Pulse Cinema," in which the film itself fades in and flickers out according to the pulmonary ups and downs of the audience. Scenes of high-stress are seamlessly projected, but boring moments make the whole theater drain down toward black. One particularly caffeinated individual keeps the whole place bright as day.
[Image: From "Pulse Room" by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer].
It's less the lighting effects that interest me here, though, than the idea of an archive of heart rates, a place where old rhythms could be stored. You could thus try out someone's pulse—Usain Bolt's record-shattering runs, or someone who's survived a car accident—turning the facility (call it the CardiArchive) into a kind of Brainstorm for heart rates. Adventures in tachycardia. Heart-rate sharing.
Upload new pulses into the light-cloud and experience someone else's panic as your own.
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Personal comment:
We've already posted about Rafael Lozanno-Hemmer. This project was first realised during Venice Art Biennale I believe and is now quite well known. One of his most interesting project according to me.
Monday, April 12. 2010
Abstract Makeup Can Hide Faces From Surveillance
Via PSFK Conference
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Adam Harvey, a graduate student at the New York University, is developing a privacy enhancing counter technology to protect individual privacy of an average person. Adam gathered information from various face tracking programs and is experimenting with images to make them undetectable by these software. As part of this project, he used women’s faces from a fashion design book and smeared make-up in asymmetrical designs to confuse the programs and hide them from face detection.
Personal comment:
Interesting approach to develop new makups to confuse CCTV. It would be a sort of adaptation to a new environment. Even if it seems a bit obvious too: any hard makup will mask your face...
But if it is really done in close connection to the way software is working and that the makup is the result of this pattern research/generatiopn, then it's really something to go deeper into.
Tuesday, April 06. 2010
Ice Cream Climatology
[Image: The Cloud Project van by Zoe Papadopoulou and Cathrine Kramer].Like a whimsical hybrid of molecular gastronomy and Glacier/Island/Storm, the Cloud Project by Zoe Papadopoulou and Cathrine Kramer, design-interaction students at London's Royal College of Art, would use "artillery dispersed ice cream ingredients," fired from roof-mounted cannons, "to make clouds snow ice cream."
[Images: From the Cloud Project by Zoe Papadopoulou and Cathrine Kramer].The van's projectile clouds of aerosolized nanotechnology would kick-start snowflake formation high above—seemingly inspired by the cloud-producing exhalations of open-ocean algae—but they would also then scent the resulting snowfall with the aroma of fresh strawberries.
The result? Ice cream, delivered soft, cold, and delicious, falling straight from the afternoon sky. Perhaps we'll soon all need ice cream gloves.
[Image: A how-to guide for precipitating strawberry ice cream by Zoe Papadopoulou and Cathrine Kramer].Oddly, BLDGBLOG proposed a variant on this—scented snow—a few years back, so it should come as no surprise that I think it's at least worth a shot. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
But it's worth asking what other foodstuffs might also be made to precipitate directly from the summer sky—when agriculture gives up the ghost, say, or once our planetary soils have been entirely depleted, could we someday farm the sky? Aerocultural precipitation: nutrition fresh and direct from the planet's atmosphere.
And what a strange planet it would be if this somehow sparked runaway ice cream climate change: unstoppable drifts of Chunky Monkey filling the streets of Montreal, vast glaciers of the stuff carving valleys through Antarctic plains.
(Thanks to Liam Young for the tip! Speaking of food, meanwhile, don't miss the previous post about this coming weekend's quarantine banquet).
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fabric | rblg
This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.
We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.
Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.
This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
