Avant-garde architecture and design group Minimaforms created a system to project SMS messages on plumes of smoke. Installed in two Bristol locations last month for the OFFLOAD festival in Bristol, UK, the "ephemeral speaking cloud structures" meld smoke signals with text messaging. The result, as least judging by photos posted to the Creative Review blog, is a stunningly surreal wordscape. From Creative Review:
"Participants engage in a collective act of writing space through the use of light as a virtual writing machine onto ephemeral plumes of smoke," explain Minimaforms. In other words, onlookers can text messages which are then displayed using light projected into plumes of smoke. Their texts "are fed through dynamic coding that recognizes, archives and plays back a real time visualization. This visualization is then grafted onto trajectories of smoke that form a dynamic ephemeral field that is affected by all external forces in the space of performance. Through turbulence the smoke writes or erases the grafting of the inputted text."
