Projects that don’t yet exist in the real world. Please email me at joelgethinlewis dot com if you’d like to discuss them.
Inspired by the following excerpt from The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman, relating to the research of Jonathan Hagstrum:
A pitch black room. Live infrasound is relayed to the human hearing range in the space by a series of speakers and audio processing equipment.
A regular pentagon of Ultra Panavision 70 proportion projection screens show an audio reactive greyscale 65mm film resolution or above realtime rendering of each of the following digital simulations:
Rebuild the Memosyne Atlas, but reimagined with new insights provided by machine learning.
A room with a single lightbulb that turns off when everyone in the room has their eyes closed.
An ambisonic sound installation. Half the room is completely silent, half sounds like the depths of a waterfall.
An American motel room inside a white cube. Visitors enter via the front door. Inside the motel room, it feels like 2am. Cars passing outside the room cast light through the blinds of the room.
A series of hand drawn graphite pencil statements on A0 pieces of archival paper. Each statement is an Escher sentence – also known as a comparative illusion. For example:
More people have been to Russia than I have.
An example of an Escher sentence
Inspired by the Ouroboros. An array of separate rooms are linked by placing dual projectors in them, with projection screens. Cameras face the screens. Each room is linked to the next and previous room in the array of rooms via the camera and screen pairs. The final room in the array is linked to the first, in an infinite loop for the duration of the installation. In this way, a person can clap in any of the rooms and have the clap pass down the chain to the their left and have it come back to them on their right, and vice versa.
Inspired by this passage from The Scientist as Rebel by the late Freeman Dyson:
Water is shown at critical opalesence in a series of glass containers, so that light might be projected through them. The necessary equipment to maintain the physical phenomenon surrounds each sample of water. The light is projected on the matt white walls of an otherwise pitch black room.
A single room, one vertical wall entirely full of Marshall amplifiers, floor to ceiling. Every amp visibly cabled to a single contact microphone gaffer taped securely to the floor of the room. Every amplifier is powered, with all dials at maximum. Visitors must tiptoe if they want to keep their sense of hearing. All other surfaces are painted matt white.