CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, April 17, 2024

to make sense of color, google plays sound frequencies with changing neon lights in milan

www.designboom.com: For Milan Design Week 2024, Google Design Studio is making sense of color. In fact, that’s the name of the immersive light and sound installations, in collaboration with arts and research lab, Chromasonic. When visitors enter the exhibition at Garage 21 in Via Archimede, 26 until April 21st, they find 21 open-box rooms flanked with semi-translucent panels. Inside each box, overhead neon lights shift their hues as the rhythm of the sound frequencies being played in the background changes.

4 comments:

Leumas said...

I don’t think I fully understand what the context around this exhibition was, but I do think that exhibits that help members of the public experience light sounds like a great project. Experiential projects seem interesting to design because they require thinking outside of the box and require unique solutions. You may be able to use standard theatrical and architectural lighting fixtures, but you may also need to do some of your engineering and build custom units. There are a lot of options to choose from when determining how to control these systems, although I would probably choose to program it in EOS because that is what I am most familiar with. That could bring up new and interesting challenges of figuring out how to use software and hardware in ways it should be able to be used, but pushing its boundaries. Finally, I think it is interesting how to make these systems interact and interface with other systems, such as sound and projections.

Abby Brunner said...

Even after reading this article and watching the promotional video attached, I’m still unclear about the objective of this interactive art exhibit. While the premise and practice of it seems cool and an interesting exploration of the human’s 5 senses, it’s hard to imagine large amounts of people coming to view this exhibit. Not only that but the location where these plexiglass boxes are placed combined with the lighting looks something straight out of a horror movie, and I would be too afraid to enter these rooms and close my eyes to listen and feel. I think what Google created was an interesting exploration, and I want to learn more about the making of this exhibit, especially since they used in Making Sense of Color unscented recycled pink paper, to simulate cherry blossom petals falling. Their use of recycled materials to stimulate and simulate the original object is very interesting and I wonder if other art exhibits will look to Google’s Installation to learn more about interactive, sustainable exhibits.

Sam Regardie said...

This was a pretty interesting read, but at the same time, I agree with the other commenters that I have a bit of confusion about the purpose of the exhibit. Some parts of the article felt a bit vague and overly profound and artistic, which took away from the actual meaning of the piece, at least for me. At the same time, however, I think it is a pretty cool exhibit. Color is something that people experience every day in many many ways, but the majority of people don't stop to actually think about it. I'm not sure the average viewer will get everything out of the exhibit that is described in the article, but at the very least it will make people think about color and how it impacts them in everyday life. And even if they can't get that, I would say it is a very beautiful exhibit nonetheless and the use of color is unsurprisingly pretty good.

Gemma said...

This is a cool installation - the photos without any audio are really pretty. I really like the idea of sensory experiences that unanchor us from our cell phones and invite us to connect and ground ourselves into the world around us through these neon light boxes, and the played frequencies. In our hectic world, sometimes moments of pause like this are needed, and while it seems like this installation has a specific location and purpose for its creation (although I wish that they would highlight that a little bit more), the concept behind it is something that I believe would be popular today. I do wish the article had gone into more of the intricacies of the technology used for this installation and the reasons why they chose to use what they did. Overall though, I really do think that this playing and exploring textures through color and light is a fascinating concept that I would love to experience.