Dust Serenade: Interactive MIT Installation Honors Sound Science Pioneer

In the latter part of the 1800s, German physicist August Kundt devised an ingenious experiment that allowed him to measure the speed of sound in different gases by visualizing its longitudinal waves through fine lycopodium dust — an idea inspired by another German physicist, Ernst Chladni, who in the late 1700s famously visualized sound in solid materials in his seminal sand figures. (Because, as we’ve learned, all creativity builds on what came before.)

This year, a duo of MIT students, Dietmar Offenhuber and Orkan Telhan, and Austrian sound artist Markus Decker teamed up to reenact Kundt’s acoustic experiment in Dust Serenade — an interactive installation consisting of tubes filled with scraps of words and letters — “cut-up theory,” a play on the empirical bravery that made Kandt revolutionary in an era of theoretical inquiry — which turn into figures of dust as sound waves touch them. Viewers can manipulate the frequency of the sound by swiveling a rod to create different sound harmonies, which in turn reconfigure the text in different ways.

‘Dust Serenade’ intends to remind us the materiality of sound. We invite visitors to rethink about the tension between their theoretical knowledge and the sensory experience.”

The project was funded by MIT’s Council for the Arts and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture. It is currently on exhibition at the rather wonderful MIT Museum until December 24 — do stop by if you get a chance.

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AnthroPosts: Analog Post-It Found Art, Digitized

Voyeurism, organic apricots, and indulging the human penchant for patternicity.

Since October 16, 2007, digital artist Noah Pedrini has been combining two of our favorite things: Found art and sticky-notes. Collecting other people’s discarded Post-Its from Brooklyn to Boston to Buenos Aires, he created AnthroPosts — a fascinating collection of more than 300 found Post-Its that offers both an analog antidote to and a narrative parallel of today’s fragmented, short-form digital communication.

This very second, someone, somewhere, is busy jotting something down on a Post-it® note. A phone number, a grocery list, a reminder. And there is someone who has just finished dialing, just finished buying, just been reminded; and is now tossing the pastel-colored square on the ground.

You can explore the collection in a number of interactive ways, organizing the notes by complexity (how much has been written on them), color (intensity and hue), and common words (“chicken” and “please” are particularly prominent staples of Post-It vocabulary), while a voiceover stream reading the notes gives the experience an almost haunting quality.

And while privacy crusaders would no doubt frown, we love the lean-back voyeurism the project exudes. (As opposed to the more lean-forward kind of PostSecret and We Feel Fine‘s content, actively and purposefully contributed by users.) AnthroPosts offers quiet insight into the most mundane reality of people’s lives, tickling your imagination to fill the voids in the process — from the person’s romantic relationships (“organic apricots for Tess” on a shopping list whispers of young love) to what they do for a living (“property code 8043″ could belong to a bland building inspector, or to the right-hand-man of a mafia kingpin) to complete life stories (apples and milk on a shopping list in Russia paint pictures of New York’s newest, most wide-eyed immigrants).

I know many might not see them quite like I do, inadvertent messages in a bottle, but that’s okay. If some find an appreciation in the curves of an “S”, the vertical symmetry of an “E”, or the self-similarity of an “A”, I’ll keep collecting, and sharing what I find here, for those willing to look.

Mostly, we love that AnthroPosts feeds our hard-wired human tendency to look for patterns in everything, to build storytelling around even the most barren of narrative landscapes and create meaning where there’s only a hint thereof.

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Mobile Mobile: The Christmas Tree Retought

Dusty phones, giant chandeliers, and a post-modern Christmas tree that tweets.

This month, interactive artist James Theophane was tasked with creating a holiday experience that embodied the spirit of collaboration for London ad agency Lost Boys. When he heard that there had been an agency-wide cell phone upgrade two months earlier, leaving behind fifty old phones, Theophane decided to upcycle the old phones into a reinterpretation of the idea of the Christmas tree and its role as a communal focal point.

The result was Mobile Mobile, a giant interactive chandelier, where each hanging phone plays a different note of a Christmas carol and flashes in time.

The elaborate scheme works by assigning a tone to each phone and making it individually addressable by a computer to create the choral arrangement, bringing the choir of devices to life.

Visitors and onlookers can “play” the installation from their browser, and it has also been wired to respond to tweets.

Indulge your inner geek with a behind-the-scenes look at the rather impressive production process. And if you have an old phone lying around, unless you can wire it up into a brilliant interactive chandelier, why not consider donating it to Hope Phones?

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30 Years of Innovation: Happy Birthday, ITP

Mud, paparazzi, and what rodents have to do with the bleeding edge of interactive technology.

A self-decapitating squirrel-as-clock, voice-activated tug-of-war games, and anti-paparazzi fashion aren’t typical student thesis projects, but then the program for which they were created is no typical program. NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) celebrates its 30^th anniversary from October 1^st through 3^rd this year, and belying its ’70s-era name, the ITP is the go-to place for the newest in new media.

A cross between experimental arts studio and R&D technolab, the ITP is a two-year degree program and self-described “center for the recently possible.” The current course catalog reads like some kind of avant-hacker’s dream: Cabinets of Wonder, Design for UNICEF (taught by faculty member Clay Shirky), and Sousveillance Culture are among the many electives available.

ITP’s bi-annual thesis shows have become must-see events for talent recruitment and pure geekdom alike. The artists, designers, engineers, theorists, and technologists that make up the program’s community of alumni/ae, faculty, and students include a current MacArthur Fellow, numerous TED presenters, and Ze Frank — in short, a who’s who of high-minded cool.

With equal emphasis on hardware and software, student projects push the boundaries of new technology but with a distinctly user-centered focus. Some, like Plott by Thomas Chan, have immediate real-world application—as applications (of the iPhone variety). Others, like Tom Gerhard’s Mud Tub, take a more theoretical bent. All draw on life as their laboratory, and we love how they augment our experience of interacting with the world.

As it turns 30, the ITP’s mission—to explore creative applications of communications technologies—is more relevant now than ever. The program’s immersive approach to learning excites us not only because it approaches the classroom as playground, but also because it’s a great example of design within social contexts. (And consistent with this collaborative ethos, ITP has set up a wiki so that its current and past students and faculty can assemble a timeline of the program’s history.)

With concentrations in design areas such as assistive technology, mobile computing, and sustainability, the program has not only kept pace with the times but seems poised to lead the way into the brave, new, mediated landscape we live in. To see what makes ITP such a cool place, check out a project portfolio and a few additional videos.

Kirstin Butler holds a Bachelor’s in art & architectural history and a Master’s in public policy from Harvard University. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn as a freelance editor and researcher, where she also spends way too much time on Twitter.

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