s q u i d s o u p . o r g

Our latest project, a collaboration with ETH Zurich and horao GmbH and featuring their wonderful NOVA 3D LED grid, will be premiered at the French Connection Friday Late at the V&A museum in London on 31 October 2008.

Planes, missiles and other hardware that deflect or otherwise avoid radar detection were key in the race for world supremacy. Detection avoidance, or stealth technology, was one of many ‘developments’ to emerge from the Cold War.

In the Stealth project, two grids of triggers target and launch missiles across an abstracted 3D space at each other, attempting to avoid radar detection and annihilate the opposition.

However, in contrast to the Mutually Assured Destruction madness of the arms race, the piece acts as a collaborative spatial musical instrument – each ‘missile’ emits sounds based on its relative position and the conditions it encounters along its trajectory.

The Stealth Project developed from research into the creative possibilities of volumetric, or 3D, visualisation techniques. Recent Squidsoup experiments using a Baby NOVA (the physical centrepiece of this project) suggested that this kind of three-dimensional light grid has considerable potential for abstract gaming applications.

Full press release here: stealth-text-final

NOVA links: 1 2 3

The piece also uses 2x Monome 64 devices as control interfaces. These are handmade, beautiful and sustainably built.

Our man in Carlisle reports bad weather but enthusiasm never-the-less for the fascinating behaviour of the Glowing Pathfinder Bug. 6th July saw the first Portable Pixel Playground which was a success despite torrential rain and gale force winds.

Clear sighting of the pathfinder in two stages of metamorphosis

The first stages of domestication?

(image courtesy of Folly)

More details at squidsoup.org/bugs

Our project Freq2 shown as part of StreetVibe, a street festival celebrating science education and music. The event took place at The Scoop, by Tower Bridge, London on 14th June 08.