At the start of the 20th century, humans were just figuring out how to communicate over the airwaves. By the century's close, we were awash in invisible transmissions. This installation takes an unusual approach to visualizing that wireless world: It beams messages from one computer to another using smoke rings.
Binary Talk was created by Niklas Isselburg and Jakob Kilian, students at Köln International School of Design. You start by typing a sentence, which a computer turns into binary code. A loudspeaker belches the message through a cloud of fog, rendering each "1" as a compact vortex ring. The rings sail along for a few feet, hit a catcher's mitt of lasers, and get translated by a second computer back into text. It's the miracle of wireless telegraphy, as interpreted by that guy from college who could do cool tricks after bong rips.
Through making the transmissions visible, Isselburg and Kilian hope to confound the "apparent immateriality and infallibility of computer language." Put more simply, the installation is supposed to remind us of the tremendous exchange of data happening in our midst every day. And that can't hurt. Once, we could look at roads and pipes and power lines and see what type of world we were building. Today's ghostly infrastructure is much harder to discern.
