Category: LookingOutwards02

The project “Eternal Blue” by Richard Vijgen visualizes malicious packets caught by the university’s firewall in real time, inspired by a significant cyberattack that the university experienced. I find this project fascinating because it reveals the often unseen danger of cyberattacks, which can have severe consequences without our awareness. The concept of making the invisible visible is powerful and thought provoking.  

The artist visualizes the country of origin of the attacks using different colored pixels, with each intercepted packet logged as a single colored pixel. While the article does not specify how the colors were chosen to represent each origin, I see potential in further exploring the color representation aspect, which could add another layer of meaning to the project. This project shares similarities with the wifi signal visualization project we discussed in class, as both reveal the continuous unseen processes happening around us.

Eternal Blue – Invisible digital dimensions of reality

 

Outwards from June – Report 2: Joshua Ellingson’s Oscilloscope Clips

Here’s a super fun project by Joshua Ellingson titled Oscilloscope Clips for April-May 2022, where oscilloscope art is combined with Pepper’s Ghost illusions (really makes me want to try it!!) Basically, oscilloscope art is produced using a oscilloscope which is playing oscilloscope music (explained further with links below). The display from the oscilloscope is then projected using the Pepper’s Ghost technique so that it looks 3-D and as if it’s a hologram dancing to music inside of a glass shell.

I’ve found a lot of ‘sound visualizers.’ The simplest, most home-made (or high-school-science-classroom-made) project I found is Sound Visualizer & Chladni Patterns Formed on a Plastic Bucket // Homemade Science with Bruce Yeany I’m not sure if this is technically an oscilloscope, but it is definitely visualizing sound waves in a similar way. I think that what’s cool about Bruce Yeany’s sound visualizer is that it’s hand-held and easy to make! He also just seems like a super chill, nice guy and explains how the science and the set-up work in a way that’s easy to understand. There’s this other guy, Steve Mould, who made a similar sound visualizing device, but for his device to work he needs to put a Bluetooth speaker in a bowl, which is a more expensive set-up, and requires all sounds to be visualized to come from that Bluetooth speaker (as opposed to being able to capture live sounds and yell into it, like Bruce does). Finally, there’ a super cool video about called This is Music On An Oscilloscope – (Drawing with Sound) which shows how you can use an oscilloscope to draw things with sound and explains that you can actually make music to be enjoyed as oscilloscope music! In the video the first show how a track called “blocks” looks through the oscilloscope and they explain that this kind of music is created to be both audibly AND visually interesting.

I think all these projects are super cool, but I would be interested in getting them to visualize or capture vibrations in the environment that are just below our level of audio perception. Thinking about ‘the music of the spheres’ for example, from the previous post, I’d be interested in having an oscilloscope display not only making the invisible (sound) visually perceptible, but also making the inaudible (at least to human ears) AND invisible perceptible.

As for the sources that inspired Joshua Ellingson for this project, he states that he’s learned about the work of Jerobeam Fenderson & Hansi Raber and their OsciStudio utilities. He got the oscilloscope from a friend.

Variants (2022) is an ongoing site specific installation by Pierre Huyghe in Kistefos, Norway.  Link to Variants: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/473018/pierre-huyghevariants/

The techs used here seems way beyond my range of knowledge but the work and visuals are very beautiful. Huyghe built this bio-machinery ecosystem (?) in a sculpture park. The screen in the picture above displays a scanned simulation of the environment. He has multiple sensors that inputs the data of the soil toxicity, water levels, solar levels, the wind, movements of animals and so on into the simulation (the simulation can also be manipulated and navigated). The simulation is then incorporated into a digital network, and AI is used to generate mutations onto this simulated network (mentioned Dall-E and another AI that I can’t make sense of due to his strong French accent. He starts talking about this from the 3:08 minutes mark) and the simulation starts to grow and transform on its own. (Whether the mutations are random or not he does not say, but they seem way too conforming to his aesthetics and themes to be entirely random)

What’s interesting to me is that he also makes the mutations come true in the actual physical environments of this installation. I have no idea how he’s doing this, and I quote him from the interview that “once in a while…the mutations in the digital simulations *somehow*” go out and is implemented, manifesting in the physical world. These affect the place loop back to the sensors and the scanners and so there’s a constant changing and growing feedback loop. He also says towards the end of this segment (around 4:52) that the camera/scanner is probably also controlled and manipulated by an AI and thus the way the environment is captured also changes over time.

I’m mostly interested in his feedback loop that changes the environment (I do feel like the fact that someone may have to manually implement the mutations takes away from the project a little), and the (?)emergent(?) mutations he does in the digital simulation. It feels like playing God to a certain extent.

Interview and intro to his works:

This piece by Jay Vidyarthi uses a strap wrapped around a participant’s chest to measure their breathing. This breathing is then translated into various sound patterns, including sound effects, music, and recordings of people speaking. Other than the sound feedback from their breathing, the participant is deprived of sensory input to allow them to focus more on the auditory experience. The goal of this piece is to deepen the participant’s meditative experience by having the only input they receive from their environment directly reflect the behavior of their own body, allowing them to be more mindful of it.