Material Samples is a research project that extends our studio’s interest in exploring design opportunities found through the translations between digital and physical media. Along with other experimental projects and interactive installations we have created through this interrogation, this project is meant to expose the curious and fun possibilities that potentially lie ahead as the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds become increasingly ambiguous.

The project uses computation as a tool to challenge the conventions of media specificity found in architecture and surrounding disciplines to describe space in a discrete way. Material Samples uses computation to utilize the mediums of video and spatial information to translate data into the medium of sound in real time. This real-time translation focuses less on the bounded categories of mediums, but more the strange overlaps and reconciles their inconsistencies through design. This project speculates on what a transition from medium specificity to one of media indeterminacy would look like in a world that we often experience mediated through digital devices.

This project continues a line of artistic inquiries about how we explore the public spaces of cities, from the live performative derives of Guy Debord and Vito Acconci’s Following Piece to cartographic field work-based projects like Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Reality Properties: Fake Estates and Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts.While these projects act as conceptual inspiration for Material Samples, the continued development of the tools used to carry out the project is a technical pursuit grounded in programming and the various methods used to computationally convert images, or in our case live video, and three-dimensional data into audio. Our general approach is to reverse engineer the various methods used to create a spectrogram or image map of sound and integrate a 3D scan of the material.