Installation for STRP Festival
Becoming the magnet
At OOOH Studio I led MGNT, a room-sized instrument built for STRP Festival 2017. STRP wanted the story of Kid Baltan told, the Eindhoven engineer who made one of the first electronic pop records a few streets away. Because of this we built something a visitor operates with their body, and it took First Prize in the STRP Biënnale ACT II award.
01 · Strijp, sixty years earlier
Tape spliced into loops
Electronic music has a beginning, and part of it happened in Eindhoven. Engineers at the Philips NatLab in Strijp spliced magnetic tape into loops to synthesise tones and clicks.
Dick Raaijmakers, working as Kid Baltan, used those techniques to record one of the first electronic pop records. It happened a few streets from the festival site, and almost nobody at the festival knew.
STRP wanted it told. A festival audience is moving and usually in a crowd, so the telling had to be something they could do with their hands and their feet.
02 · Each visitor a magnet
Warping the sound yourself
In MGNT each person becomes a magnet. Move through the space and you warp the generative sound and the visuals the way a magnet warps tape.
There are no instructions, no interface and no wrong way to use it. That tends to matter at a festival, because nobody stops to read.
I led concept, interaction and spatial design, and held art direction across the collaborators. What If Collective on production, Andri Pétur Þrastarson on sound design, and a software developer on the generative system.
The concept scaled to any room, and we still tested model after model before committing, because we were building for the Klokgebouw and not for a tour.
03 · Klokgebouw, 2017
A central piece
MGNT ran at the Klokgebouw during STRP Festival 2017 and became one of the festival's central pieces.
The generative audio and visuals responded continuously to where people stood, so the piece never repeated and never needed a queue or a turn. Visitors who came for the spectacle left having used a 1950s studio technique with their own body.
Throughput is the business problem at a festival. A piece people queue for constrains the room, and a piece people walk past costs the same to build. MGNT carried a crowd and still gave each person something that responded only to them.
First Prize in the STRP Biënnale ACT II award, with 30,000 euro attached to it.
Specification
Detail
What it delivered
Interactive
Your own movement through the room warps the generative sound and visuals, with no instructions and no interface to learn.
Anyone can play it
Hold a crowd
Continuous response to where people stand, so the piece never repeats and never needs a queue or a turn.
Throughput at a festival
Directed
Production by What If Collective, sound design by Andri Pétur Þrastarson, and a software developer on the generative system.
Built with three partners