The Distributed Legible City (1998), Jeffrey
Shaw
(http://www.jeffrey-shaw.net/html_main/frameset-works.php)
Jeffrey
Shaw is a media artist who was one of the pioneers of the interactivity and virtuality
in his advanced technological installations. The Distributed Legible City
(1998) is an improvement of Jeffrey’s previous installation work: The Legible
City (1989). Three were three versions of it. They were all the transformation
of real world cities to computer graphic virtual cities, which means the map of
the city was based on real ground plans of some existing cities in our world.
The respective three versions were Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe.
The
Legible City is a “readable” city that comprised of letters, words and phrases
which were the major components of the buildings in the virtual city. It is a
textual formation world. The images were projected on a large screen in front
of a real bicycle. Audience can travel around the three-dimensional city by “riding”
on it. As the handlebar and the pedals were the direction and speed
controllers, audience have to continue doing physical movement on the bike in
order to drive the bike to move forward or turn left and right in the virtual
city. Audience can go anywhere in the virtual cities and see the textual
landscape while passing through street by street. In this new version of
Legible City, the letters (buildings) are not meaningless anymore; they have
the particular meaning referring to the real architectures itself. Also, the
letters are scaled to the actual proportion of its reference buildings so that
it could reflect the actual appearance of the real city. Besides, the new
Legible City allows more than two persons to take part in the travel. Travelers
could meet each other in some places and share their experiences through
conversation, just like an online game nowadays.
I really
love this art work as it was revealing the progression of technology and the
idea of “letter city”. In the late 1990s, people started to link each other by
using computer network; Jeffrey applied this kind of technology in 3D
environment. It indicated today’s internet world. Moreover, he provided an
unusual way for us to experience the extraordinary travel in those cities that
people used to familiar with. Apart from the impressive visual effect brought
by the perspective of 3D computer graphic environment, Audience only see the
letters instead of buildings standing alongside the road, they can also enjoy
drifting anywhere of the city in order to browse and explore the meanings of
the textual architecture. The Legible City give audience a complete different
angle and view to look at the world that they have lived for a long time. Then
they are able to share their little discovery with the other participants. This
is the most interesting part of the work.
This
installation work cannot be finished without the participation of audience. It
is not just an artwork or an experiment of computer science, but also about the
humanity. It implies the inseparable between human and science in future.
Perhaps some days the virtual world would become a part of our reality. And now
we all have a second identity (maybe more) in the internet world.
AguaSonic Acoustics—seeing
sound in the sea
Audio:http://www.newscientist.com/data/av/audio/article/mg20527452.200/atlantic_spotted.mp3
Audio:http://www.newscientist.com/data/av/audio/article/mg20527452.200/white_beaked.mp3
The pictures above are the visualized sound of whales and dolphins
created by Mark Fischer, who is an acoustic engineer and also a president of
Nova Engineering. I extracted two of the audios and its reference image for
simply introducing the AguaSonic Acoustics. He recorded the high quality of
biological sound and then processed them to image from AGUASONIC®, which can convert sound to image by using the
mathematics of wavelet, designed by Mark.
The first image of sound produced by an Atlantic spotted dolphin recorded
near the Azores. We can hear both the clicking sound and whistling sound in the
spotted dolphin audio. Then, the beautiful sketchy blue flower shape comes out.
The second one and the third one generated by the same source of white-beaked
dolphins recorded near Iceland. We can hear the regular clicking sound in the
audio. The images are also radiate shape but the second one is more like a
flower then the spotted dolphin’s image of sound. It is because Mark produced
it in a much more complex way. He piled up the sound clips and then rotated
them. He also changed the sizes of different sound clip. Finally, he made this
fabulous work. He even thinks that it is an ‘artistic license taken to the
extreme’.
Transforming sound into visible images is really a wonderful idea. Can
you imagine that you can ‘see’ the sound? In the classes, I learnt the very
basic knowledge about sound such as how objects create sound and how people
hear sound. Sound wave can be shown on paper in the mathematic graph. This can
be a kind of ‘visualizing sound’. I remember that in a TV series called Heroes,
there is a girl who can actually see the colorful sound waves dancing in the
air. When I was watching the scenes, I was quite jealous of her ability.
Although I don’t have the superpower, now I can appreciate the image of sound.
I don’t mean the boring curves drawn on graphs, but the varied and colorful
image of sound generated by AGUASONIC®. I look at
those beautiful pictures and listen to its reference dolphin singing at the
same time. I can imagine how dolphins and whales sing in the dark and
mysterious sea and how the vibration of sound creates ripples as if the three
radiate floral images shown above.
Auguasonic reminds me of John Whitney’s work: Permutation (1966) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB31mD4NmA).
The color dots would develop patterns while playing kinetic rhythm in music. When
we listen to music through computer software such as Window Media Player; we
can also enjoy the visual effects. Those ‘visible’ sounds encourage me a lots to
explore more in both vision and sound.
Other sources:
http://www.markfischer.net/index7.aspx
http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/whalesong-art
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