LED Facade Northeastern

by admin | Jun 21, 2014

LED Facade Northeastern

Hot/Cold: Information Design for Dynamic Media and Light

The collaboration with Philips Color Kinetics focuses on responsive, interactive, and public display using dynamic lighting at the architectural scale. A team of students will develop and implement design proposals that should conclude with a temporary installation on Ryder Hall on Northeastern University’s campus. This activity is embedded in a studio course on the design of interactive information displays in different contexts and at different scales, ranging from visualizations for personal, mobile devices to information displays on the urban scale. The class results can inform a broader discussion about identity and guidance systems for the campus that appeal through their abstract simplicity and dynamic responsiveness.

Team: Miriam Zisook, Ashley Treni, Lauren McCafferty, Esat Karaman, Vivian Sun, Rania Masri, advised by Dietmar Offenhuber (NEU), Susanne Seitinger (Philips CK), Zachary Fox (TA), Gadi Baron (Coop), Peter Schmitt

External links and news:
When light becomes data with information (lumec)
LED Light Installation Measures Mood (lumec)
Northeastern Center for the Arts
Your mood in lights (northeastern.edu)Video by Vivian Sun

DUST – Laboratoria Moscow

by admin | Apr 18, 2012

DUST – Laboratoria Moscow

Our interest in exploring dust as an aesthetic and interactive medium aligned perfectly with the new exhibition “DUST” (12.4.12 – 15.7.12) in Laboratoria art & science space in Moscow, curated by Daria Parkhomenko and Simon Mraz. We (Markus Decker, Orkan Telhan and me) contributed the project “dust serenade”, a musical instrument visualizing its sounds through dust particles moved by the sound waves, and based on a 19th century physics experiment by August Kundt. Images from the installation below.

Active Listening Sites

by admin | Sep 8, 2011

Active Listening Sites

A new stadtmusik work, tying together a lot of what we were working on in the past couple of years.

The physical configuration of the built environment generates a wide spectrum of acoustic effects. Even while they usually remain unnoticed, these acoustic phenomena actively support our orientation in the city and provide a sense of place.
For the exhibition, we have assembled an inventory of urban auditory situations illustrating some of these effects in the vicinity of the architecture forum. We provide a visitor of these places with instructions that facilitate awareness of these effects and decode the underlying interaction between the physical environment and the soundscape. By contrasting these situations with videos of similar situations in other cities around the world, we show shared principles and seek answers to questions such as: why do some urban spaces seem to attract or repel us? What information is being offered to our senses, what information gets lost?
We want to initiate a conversation about the soundscape as a shared, collectively owned resource, its synesthetic interactions and atmospheric elements. Stadtmusik scrutinizes the role of public space as a space of performance that provides a frame through its structures and inter-dependencies.

BackTalk (MoMa)

by admin | Jul 20, 2011

A new senseable city lab project i worked on is now exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. BackTalk is in many ways a follow up project on Trash | Track, this time focusing on obsolete electronics, disposed as e-waste or shipped as donated as refurbished computers to developing countries. All of these devices still capable of recording their location and surroundings. The initial inspiration was an incident I read about involving a lost camera, scuba diving and a sea turtle. The project focuses on the reasons why obsolete electronics move across the globe and conveys the hybrid strategies how to deal with them.

all images (c) senseable city lab 2011

dust serenade at MIT museum

by admin | Oct 21, 2010

dust serenade at MIT museum

Our new project in the dust series:

Markus Decker, Dietmar Offenhuber, Orkan Telhan

‘Dust Serenade‘ is a reenactment of an acoustic experiment done by German physicist August Kundt. Inspired by the Chladni’s famous sand figures visualizing sound waves in solid materials, Kundt devised an experiment for visualizing longitudinal sound waves through fine lycopodium dust; a setup that would allow him to measure the speed of sound in different gases.

Kundt was a strong believer in experimental methods over purely theoretical inquiry in a time when the disciplines of theoretical and experimental physics started to diverge.

‘Dust Serenade’ intends to remind us the materiality of sound. Tubes filled with scraps of words and letters–cut-up theory–interact with sound waves and turn into figures of dust. Here, visitors can modulate the frequency of the sound emitted by moving a rod and create different harmonic sound effects. As sound waves figure, refigure, and disfigure the text, we invite visitors to rethink about the tension between their theorical knowlegde and the sensory experience.

Dust Serenade is one of a series of interactive sound projects that enable visitors to experience the physical aspects of sound, presence, and atmosphere. Works in the series have been shown at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Zagreb, Istanbul and São Paulo.

The project was funded by the Council for the Arts at MIT and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture (BMUKK)