Light Speak

2010

Format
Custom electronics, software



Telegraphy, in its broadest sense, encompasses all forms of remote message transmission–from the telegrams of the 1800’s to text messaging and e-mail. Its evolution has come to inform our perception of speed and infrastructure. In the process, the communication infrastructures that mediate our exchanges and conversations have become invisible yet pervasive entities, while our notions of “how fast information ought to be” continually redraw the limits of our patience.

Light Speak is an installation that imagines a different kind of infrastructure–one that is modular, human-readable, vulnerable, and adherent to it’s own version of ‘speed’. An image of the San Francisco skyline is captured every morning, and transmitted through a series of distributed modules as morse code light pulses. Pixel by pixel, the image is reconstructed.

Exhibited at the PROTOTYPE exhibition at Gray Area in San Francisco in 2010.