SMS smoke signals

Avant-garde architecture and design group Minimaforms created a system to project SMS messages on plumes of smoke. Installed in two Bristol locations last month for the OFFLOAD festival in Bristol, UK, the "ephemeral speaking cloud structures" meld smoke signals with text messaging. The result, as least judging by photos posted to the Creative Review blog, is a stunningly surreal wordscape. From Creative Review:

“Participants engage in a collective act of writing space through the use of light as a virtual writing machine onto ephemeral plumes of smoke,” explain Minimaforms. In other words, onlookers can text messages which are then displayed using light projected into plumes of smoke. Their texts “are fed through dynamic coding that recognizes, archives and plays back a real time visualization. This visualization is then grafted onto trajectories of smoke that form a dynamic ephemeral field that is affected by all external forces in the space of performance. Through turbulence the smoke writes or erases the grafting of the inputted text.”

Link

[#1 posted by phasor3000 , October 3, 2007 10:00 AM]

This visualization is then grafted onto trajectories of smoke that form a dynamic ephemeral field that is affected by all external forces in the space of performance.

In other words, a video projector projects some SMS text through clouds of stage fog? Or is there something more to it?

[#2 posted by phlavor , October 3, 2007 10:12 AM]

Very cool looking effect. Concert lighting technicians, start taking notes.

[#3 posted by phasor3000 , October 3, 2007 10:48 AM]

Phenom, please stop spamming.

Moderator?

[#4 posted by SAE Miller , October 3, 2007 12:48 PM]

"In other words, onlookers can text messages which are then displayed using light projected into plumes of smoke."

I think that this sentence from the article pretty much sums up what they are doing, unlike the one quoted in the article. At first when I read it I had thought that they were actually creating the smoke in the forms of words from text messages, instead simple smoke screens are created and a projector sends light through it. That doesn't seem to be as creative as the paragraph makes it out to be.

[#5 posted by Buttermaker , October 3, 2007 8:19 PM]

They've been doing something similar for a few years at the Fountain of Wealth in Singapore with H2O mist and frikin' lasers. http://www.oraclelaser.com/suntec.htm

[#6 posted by pixelpusher , October 3, 2007 8:31 PM]

It's brilliant. You guys are missing the point. It's about taking an ancient form of communication and bringing it into the digital age. Very cool.

[#7 posted by michael05 , October 4, 2007 11:01 AM]

One of my students projected silhuettes of people in a cabinet in order to generate their invisible aura. The results were impressive:
http://gestaltung.fh-wuerzburg.de/blogs/museum_20/?p=858

[#8 posted by Cefn Hoile , October 4, 2007 4:12 PM]

This effect is fantastic, but you have to see some earlier footage of their experiments.

I grabbed some video of 'Smoke Signals' in 2006 at Faster than Sound near Ipswich, UK.

They hadn't anticipated the first message being 'It's raining in New York' containing an apostrophe which broke their SQL code.

The upshot - the coolest presentation of a MySQL Error Message ever - drifting across a smoke-field.

You can see the footage in the blog entry (I only got around to documenting it earlier this year).