Kevin Riordan-Looking Outwards-04-Section C

For this week’s Looking Outwards, I chose to write about the Cycling Wheel, an installation/performance done in 2017, in Nuit Blanche Taipei. The creators Keith Lam, Seth Hon, and Alex Lai based their idea on Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel sculpture, which is an upside down bicycle wheel mounted on a stool. The sounds are created by turning bicycle wheels that are lit up, and connected with strings as shown in the picture above. The sound produced is very similar to festival or techno music, but it is kind of hard to tell how the sound changes by turning the wheels in the performance, probably because there were three people controlling individual aspects of the overall sound. I could not find much about the algorithm to turn the wheel spinning into sound, but a custom made software was created using Processing, to control the light beams, led strips, and music. A picture of the interface is included, and I really admire how clean the interface looks, and how much work went into making such a unique project.