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Microtonal Wall
Microtonal Wall by Tristan Perich is a massive installation at the MoMA that consists of 1,500 1-bit speakers, each tuned differently to create a giant soundscape that changes depending on the viewer’s distance. It’s elegant and minimal in execution, Microtonal Wall is an extension of a piece Perich has been working on for several years called Drift Multiply, another large polyphonic composition, and Machine Drawings, a drawing program that deals with the intersection of randomness and order. I love pieces that force the viewer to move around and engage with the work, which this does nicely.
Cloud Tweets
Cloud Tweets is an installation piece created by David Bowen that maps a video feed of clouds to a virtual keyboard, which is used to type and post tweets. I was pleasantly surprised by this, the twitter is unexpectedly iterative, with certain sequences frequently occurring (e.g. “?><“). It’s an interesting take on a sensor-to-tweet Twitter feed, and makes for a delightful pun on “cloud computing”. David is also responsible for “Fly Tweets”, a similar piece where a group of flies trigger keyboard strokes via video, which is then collected and posted on their collective twitter account. I would’ve liked to have seen more variation from Fly Tweets–although novel without the context of the earlier piece, Cloud Tweets seems like a slightly different variation on his previous work.
Vertwalker
Vertwalker, created by Berlin-based collective Sonice Development (initially designed by member Achim Meyer), is a robot with a marker attached to it that can move vertically along walls. The piece draws inspiration from compact autonomous robots like the Roomba, and emerging vertical cityscapes. The group has previously run two different trials with older prototypes. I love the idea of drawing robots, especially one that can draw directly onto walls, but I was disappointed that the drawing was determined by collision detection. I feel that this piece would’ve been more interesting and engaging had there been some sort of concrete image it was attempting to create, perhaps having a computer vision system communicate with the robot.