Desert of Sine

This installation was shown at the Speed Show: REBELHUIS, A one night event at Ace Teleboutique, Rotterdam (2010).

 These are the footprints of images traveling through sine waves.

From a computer a user can upload any (webcam) image to the server and the computer will turn it into a 1 minute loud futuristic sound using sine waves. This plays through a speaker set. At the same moment a microphone connected to the same computer will record that sound again with background noises present, and transform it back into an image. This way the image will show the interference during the transformation, capturing time and space of the surroundings, becoming some sort of map because of this extra layer of data that is embedded. The resulting images are black and white and grainy all over, with peaks here and there. They are uploaded to the internet and shown on another screen simultaneously.

As for the technical details: I was experimenting with using Tumblr as a place to store the image before and after transformation. I created a front end for uploading pictures (on the laptop) and one for viewing the altered images (on the flat screen display). At the same time a python script was running that extracted the new uploads from Tumblr, converted the images into bmps, transformed them into sound, played and recorded that sound, transformed them back into images and uploaded it to Tumblr again.

View all the results on Tumblr

More documentation on the event’s website, ‘Rebelhuis’