:: project #12

nausea transformer

date: [2007-ongoing]
authors: nancy diniz & cesar branco

presented at:
- Siggraph 2007 34th International Conference, Poster Session. San Diego, California, USA, 5-9 August 2007. Granted Siggraph 2007 ACM’s Student Research Competition Award. - Transitive Materials workshop, Ubicomp 2007, Innsbruck 16 September 2007. - Coming up: permanent exhibit at "Museum of Living Science", Lousal, Portugal 2008.

   :: concept

The word "noise" comes from the Latin word nausea meaning "seasickness", or from a derivative (perhaps Latin noxia) of Latin noceo = "I do harm", referring originally to nuisance noise. Generally all non-musical sounds are considered to be noise. Noise is a complex concept and source material to deal with; it is an invisible architecture with an undefined aesthetics. It deeply affects people and yet people feel very powerless to interact with or control it. Our purpose is to raise people’s awareness to sound, in all its forms: speech, non-speech sound (sound pollution sources) or natural sound, and treat it like data with a corporeal dimension. To convey an embodiment to a often neglected “hidden dimension” adding it to a phenomenology and a poetics of visual space. Building up on our research in interactive membranes, we introduce "Nausea Transformer": a sound reprocessed machine that unexpectedly can create pleasant experiences by recycling noise into pleasant sound. The fundamental idea is to turn noise into a reprocessed living, evolving tangible experience interacting spatially and temporally with the environment and its observers

:: keywords: Evolutionary design, HCI, Interactive environments.		  
:: images