Audio Window

The Video:

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The Site:

Given the assignment to make a large scale reactive installation to be located off campus, we began to search for a location. We didn’t make any decisions on the design of the project until we found our site because we wanted the design and reactivity to be derived from its context.

After given the option to install our project on the exterior of the Row House Cinema in Lawrenceville, we thought this would be the perfect site to get the exposure we needed. The site, located opposite a large PNC parking lot, allows for a wide field of view from multiple locations surrounding the site. We chose the center of that exterior wall for just this reason.

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The Concept:

The next phase was to decide what we wanted the project to do. Being located on the outside of a cinema, it seemed natural to react to the activities occurring inside the theater. We drew inspiration from the bricked over window openings that lined the exterior wall facing the parking lot. We decided to create a window into the space but provide an abstraction of what was happening. The project soon became an audio reading device which responded to the highs and lows of the movies playing inside.

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The Design: 

The look of the piece became critical once we had decided what to do. We wanted to contrast the brick face but also keep elements of the context as we designed the frame. We used wood, exposed bolts and sheet metal to house the hardware and lights. Within the frame, we used fishing line and orange acrylic tubes filled with water which refracted the light to give a lantern like effect. The tubes were arrayed in a wave formation which remains constant unless there is a sound input. As the sound increases, the wave becomes faster and more violent.

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Final Product:

When all of these elements combine, the result is a dynamic object which washes the wall in light and can display a different type of show to those walking outside the theater.

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The Team:

Jaydev Ajit Kumar | Nickie Cheung | Robert Esposito | Nicole Navolio

Project Heartbeat

https://vimeo.com/127604469

Concept:

The idea behind this project was to represent the building’s heart, and inform people of how it is doing. Similar to how a person’s heartbeat would increase if a person were exercising or under stress, the building’s heartbeat increases when the energy usage increases. After a certain point of stress, a human heart has the capacity to fail. In the project presented, the building’s heart “fails” when the amount of energy usage is dangerously high. The heartbeat would increase and then stop functioning.

Ideally the site of the project would be somewhere visible to students and faculty alike. In the Gates building, this manifests itself in the central spiral ramp as the building is designed to have varying vantage points into this spiral.

waiting…

Concept:

“Waiting…” is a project that aims to pique the user’s curiosity and spark questions and conversation between people, all while having a bit of fun. The project began with the idea of a person waiting for you to move out of the seat, which is represented by the finger tapping, a universal gesture for impatience or the act of waiting. It is intended to be playful and relatable to the user and engages the user when the user does nothing. Simply by sitting on the chair, the finger will move, but when the user moves too much, the finger will stop.

https://vimeo.com/127561346

Precedent Research

rvtr – Nervous Ether Operation

From my understanding, this project attempts to materialize the intangible. In this specific instance, it interprets weather data of air pressure and wind speeds as well as local sensor responses and inflates and deflates.

Ambient Orb

The Ambient Orb displays and allows the viewer to understand how much energy is being used and how much demand is being required of the object that the orb is connected to.

Sherif Abdelmohsen, Ellen Yi-Luen Do – Energy Puppet

A project that once again, displays the amount of demand that an appliance is connected to, however this project uses a much more disruptive signal when the appliance is in heavy demand. It emits loud noises and its arms swivel violently. Sadly, there was no video documentation of this project.

Click to access SID-Energy-Puppet.pdf

The relevance of these projects is that they all begin to use data received from an outside source and display/make it known to the viewer what is going on internally. Whether the data is something that the user experiences, like rvtr uses in their Nervous Ether Operation, or whether it is data that is collected from the amount of power an appliance is using.