Rotating Letters, Flapping Noise

.

Signal to Noise is a fascinating installation for Luminato 2012, an arts festival that begins in Toronto on June 8.  This work transforms random letters into legible words with a satisfying flapping sound emitted by its moving parts.

Created by the Belgian artists LAb[au], it’s made of discarded technology and salvaged components from the information displays that predated LED monitors in public spaces like airports and train stations. The flaps rotate randomly until the system identifies a word.  (I’ve watched this video a number of times now. It’s kind of hypnotic.)

UPDATE: JUNE 10 I have just come back from the Toronto airport, where this work is installed. The noise is actually much softer than on the video, and anngrafics is right. It does indeed sound most like rain – or perhaps the sound of distant typing by a great many people, in a far away typing pool. You had to wait to step near enough to the installation to hear it. Very very popular, on a main concourse in the Air Canada terminal, on the way to overseas gates.

About these ads

Tags: ,

Categories: Art, Culture, Videos

Follow The Art Junkie

10 Comments on “Rotating Letters, Flapping Noise”

  1. 06/03/2012 at 11:35 am #

    Reblogged this on TheCoevas official blog.

  2. 06/03/2012 at 4:55 pm #

    Cool! It sounds like applause in the end.

  3. 06/03/2012 at 6:25 pm #

    Interesting..it sounds like a washing machine..

  4. 06/03/2012 at 8:13 pm #

    That too, interesting.

  5. 06/04/2012 at 6:00 pm #

    I thought it started out like rain – just love this!

    • 06/04/2012 at 7:57 pm #

      I love all these opinions on what it sounds like – none of which I’d thought of. Thanks guys.

  6. 06/08/2012 at 11:47 am #

    a shower of letters. First a downpour, then peters out to a drip, drip, drip … love it!

    • 06/08/2012 at 11:54 am #

      These comments about sounds are really great, thanks.

What do you think?

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 2,329 other followers

%d bloggers like this: