Imaginary Landscapes is a profile of visionary composer, artist and producer Brian Eno. It brings into focus Eno’s seemingly disparate work in sound, vision and light, and explores his music in visual terms, based on landscapes and images that have shaped his life as an artist.

This video captures one performance of Atom – which features a matrix of 64 gas balloons, lights, and sound by Christopher Bauder & Robert Henke (aka Monolake).

A room is filled with deep, evolving noises from a four-channel sound system. An eight-by-eight array of white, self-illuminated spheres floats in space like the atoms of a complex molecule.

Through variable positioning and illumination of each atom, a dynamic display sculpture comes into being, composed of physical objects, patterns of light, and synchronous rhythmic and textural sonic events. Change, sound, and movement converge into a larger form.

The height of the helium balloons is adjusted with a computer-controlled cable, whilst the internal illumination is accomplished using dimmable super-bright LEDs, creating a pixel in a warped 8×8 spatial matrix.

The sonic events, the patterns of light, and the movement of the balloons are manipulated in real time as a 45-60 minute-long performance.

Here’s another take on the piece:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Resources:

• Robert Henke’s explanation of the work
• An interview with Christopher Bauder & Robert Henke

As a part of the design event Urban Play 2, Droog Design and curator Scott Burnham asked NL Architects to bring in ideas for interactive urban interventions.

One of NL’s contributions is the Boom Bench. 

The Boom Bench features eight 60-watt co-axial speakers and two subwoofers that can be accessed by users through Bluetooth. Sit down on the bench, access the Boom Bench via Bluetooth, and you’ve got a monster size boom box playing your tunes at 95 dB.

Plus, a Bass Shaker in the seat transforms the deep sounds into vibrations to enhance the physical sensation of your tunes. 

The first Boom Bench was placed on the North bank of the River IJ, right in the physical center of Amsterdam. If any of our Amsterdam readers have a chance to check it out, leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Urban Play is an exhibition and an interactive route along the IJ River. Urban Play believes that “street-level inventiveness, energy and innovation is the future of creativity in the city”.

It will be shown as part of this year’s Experimenta Design Amsterdam 2008 (EXDA), the international design festival first organized in Lisbon in 1999.

via Michael Schoner via Hackaday

Nikolas Grigoriou & Nikos Moustakas‘ 3dots is an interactive audio/video installation, an interactive game, combining space, time and sound.

The application was programmed with the open source tool ‘Processing’. Advanced image and signal processing techniques were employed to identify blobs from video real time captures and extract the spatial information needed. Audio and image playback is performed using a virtual spatial gridding of the installation space in two dimensions.

The synthesized audio stream reproduction is combined with a number of visual effects, which aim to enhance the participants’ comprehension and render the “dots” installation a high-quality interactive audiovisual platform.

Hall of Fragments is a very cool installation created for the entry to the 11th International Architecture Exhibition Out There: Architecture Beyond Building.

Passage through the installation disengages visitors from the bricks and mortar of Venice and connects them to the alternative world of “Architecture Beyond Building”.

The reactive environment combines ambient music and abstract visuals to create a new type of audiovisual space.

Technical Description:

“We developed custom software using Openframeworks, an open development environment for C++. It uses 6 Mac Pro Computers, Mac Mini for Sound, 2 Mantis MG video servers, Media Matrix Digital Signal processor, 6 firewire AVT Guppy IR cameras, and custom IR filtered lighting. In the projection each point is given an initial x,y and z coordinates and wanders within a limited area. The points uses Delaunay triangulation to find their nearest neighbor points in the environment and send lines to those points. Those lines solidify and form the faceted planes that the video textures are mapped onto. During the Crescendo moment the projection mesh is surfaced with a faceted terrain that maps the pixels of the films to the facets of the surface.”

Credits

Rockwell Group with Jones | Kroloff

Project/ Hall of Fragments Principals/David Rockwell with Casey Jones and Reed Kroloff Based/New York/Detroit Credits/Tucker Viemeister, James Tichenor, Joshua Walton, Zach Gage, Keetra Dixon, Craig Negoescu, Thomas Haggerty