dust serenade at MIT museum

dust serenade at MIT museum

by | 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)

dust till dawn

dust till dawn

by | Sep 10, 2006

dust till dawn

fun with lasers, noise and dirt

maex decker, dietmar offenhuber, ushi reiter
DTD kicks up a lot of dust – with atmosphere being its sole medium of interaction. The project is a sound installation for a room with dusty floor, on which a number of phonographs are placed, playing back silent vinyl records. As a result of the visitors movements, particles of dust accumulate in the grooves of empty records and define a musical score. A carpet of monochromatic light visualizes the turbulence in the atmosphere and detects its ephemeral structures, which are directly linked to the noise generated by the dusty records. Over time, the physical impact of the interaction irreversibly consumes the interface and destroys the needles of the phonographs.

project page at servus

Exhibitions: File Festival São Paulo, 2010, uncharted/ Santral Istanbul, March 2009;  touch me festival, Zagreb, Dec. 2008; ars electronica 2006

isotope

isotope

by | Apr 23, 2005

isotope

Isotope is a generative architecture derived from the proportional system of the

Stonborough House (1925, also known as Haus Wittgenstein) designed by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Austrian architect Paul Engelmann. The house is assembled from seven cubes, arranged in a carefully balanced proportionate system. All elements correspond to each other, and it is impossible to change this system without destroying the balance of volumes and voids.

Starting from a textual representation of the model in the VRML language, the “isotopes” of the original model were created through repeated search and replace operations on the descriptive text.

try the interactive demo

Exhibited: Skopje Electronic Art Fair 1999, Skopje; File Festival, Sao Paolo, 2000; VRML-ART 2000, Monterey, US; re:modern exhibition, Künstlerhaus Vienna

From the installation at re:modern, Künstlerhaus Wien, 2003

Unit-M

Unit-M

by | Apr 9, 2000

Unit-M

An early media architecture example conceptualized and implemented as part of the ars electronica futurelab. For the new building of an Austrian education institution we conceived a display concept based on the idea of “functional transparency”, the building communicating its processes to its users, visitors and the city.

The project consists of three elements. Most visible from the city, the light columns with individually addressable RGB light elements, communicates global environmental parameters such as time of the day. A second display element, the text floor, was associated with the domain of the users, who could exchange messages (which would, for example, only be able to pass through a door if it was open). Finally, small displays in the vertical columns would show the status of the system, such as the times individual doors have opened on that day.

The user input happens over four input terminals where users could input speech, text or biometric measures such as their pulse, which would cause the light columns to blink in sync.

The project was awarded with the Joseph Binder Award 2001, the ars electronica project page with full credit list can be found here