Black Box by Absolut - "Frequency"



After a full month of prototyping, soldering and assembling, we finally showcased our installation "Frequency" at the Sónar+D festival in Barcelona last week! 

The project was kindly sponsored by Absolut and the initial brief was offered to the RCA Information Experience Design programme. We designed a sensory experience consisting of vibrations and light, where each colour from a wall of LED strips was mapped to various sound frequencies. We placed a speaker in each of the 16 plinths that made up our floor and sent a different frequency to each speaker, thus creating a floorspace where each plinth was vibrating slightly differently, inviting you to walk across the floor and explore the different vibrations whilst being immersed in colours that changed as you walk across the tiles.

It was a great experience to put up a major installation for the first time and to see the public engaging with it, particularly interesting to see how some people found certain frequencies more relaxing than others. I worked on all the tech related to the project, i.e. the wiring of the LED strips, working on the Max MSP patch that controlled both the frequencies and the colour changes, and the wiring of the speakers, whilst my classmate Robert Thorpe was in charge of the build of the plinths and the design of the structure. We got lots of help and guidance from our tutor Laura Ferrarello, and Matt Clarke from UVA (pictured below with me and Rob) also kindly lent us some DMX controllers for the project.

The first few photos are from the lovely people at 25gramos from an article they published about our piece whilst the other two photos were kindly sent to us by photographer Pepe Molina from Cromagnon








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