ACCelerate Sound Arcade

Director, Producer, and Form Maker
ACC Smithsonian Creativity and Innovation Festival, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., April 5-7, 2019
Funded by the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT), Virginia Tech

The ACCelerate Sound Arcade was an interactive mapping project that translated participants’ movements into sculptures of sound and illumination.

The interactive sound garden at the patio entrance area of the Smithsonian contained three rectangular sculptures, each with three abstract geodesic forms extending from three bases. Day-time visitors to the space used interactive LED wands to experiment with an interactive 3D sound system in real time. During the evening, the project took on another visual layer of interaction as three 8K projectors also projected onto these sculptures. In the evening visitors’ LED interactive wands illuminated in the space. The wands were designed to be interactive in real time with the sound and projection mapping. The wands were also programmed to receive data to make the LED lights on the wands illuminate in real time creating color patterns and pulses throughout the sound garden. As people moved around the space, data was gathered by their movements and then used to reflect and create new sounds and Illuminations from the projected forms.

As director, producer and form maker, I designed and built the sculptures in the sound garden. Each form was CNC’d and fabricated, then covered with spandex-type material. Each form ranged from 8- 12 feet tall. They were bundled together and secured to the ground by weighted boxes filled with sandbags in order to handle any weather scenarios. The forms were an abstract version of a geodesic dome, easy to build, maintain, secure and to projection map onto.

Collaborators: David Franusich, (form designer, content, videographer and video editor), Tanner Upthegrove (Sound and interactive engineer), Eric Lyon (Sound and interactive engineer), George Hardenbeck (ICAT facilitator), Matthew Swarts (interactive wand designer and programmer)