Tellart engineers attached censors to pitch percussion instruments (marimbas, vibraphones, wood blocks, and shakers) and then connected them to the Internet. This enables users to create music online and then watch through a live feed as the instruments play your song.
You can also make this music collaboratively with users who are anywhere in the world, including those at the museum itself.
Tellart custom designed robotic arms that can convert photographic images into drawings. Just like human artists, the robots draw by analyzing contours, i.e. the spaces between light and dark. When you send the robot an image of your face, for example, the information is converted into commands (at 1000 per second) that tell the robot to draw. You can watch this happen in real time, but the exhibit will also send you photos and video of the process.
The information on the web isn’t just floating around in the ether; it exists in a specific location, and the Data Tracer will show you this point on a topographical map of the world. I can search for “Fast Company,” for example, select any cover image of the magazine, and find out where that image is stored on the web.
I typed in “dramatic look”—you know, that hamster meme—and chose this image. In 0.209 seconds, the Data Tracer located my picture in Provo, Utah. (As a side note, the Web Lab informed me that it would have taken a carrier pigeon 5 days to deliver a physical copy of that image to me in New York.)
According to Tellart, the distinction between the online world and the physical world is already non-existent. “We object to claiming they are different,” says Cottam. It is true that we already use the Internet to order our food, steam our music, and DVR our favorite shows on the go. But if I want a milkshake, I still have to walk into the kitchen of my New York apartment and scoop the ice cream into my blender. Maybe in the future, I’ll be able to do this without getting up from my computer. Even if my computer is in London.
We tend to think of the Internet as an abstract idea, an amorphous and invisible network of information, that operates independently from the physical world. Google Creative Lab, in collaboration with the experience-design and engineering company Tellart, as well as production partners B-Reel, Universaldesignstudio, Fraser Randall and Karsten Schmidt, was looking to show you how tangible–how physical–the Internet can be. Their vehicle is the Web Lab, an interactive exhibit for creating art and music at the London Science Museum. But you don’t actually have to be in the U.K. to experience the Web Lab, and that’s very much the point. Sitting at my computer in New York, I can watch a song that I’ve composed online or a picture that I’ve scanned, come to life, in real time, across the ocean.
“When we stand in the museum, and know that we are playing music with people all over the world–on real physical instruments–it feels magical,” says Tellart Cofounder and CEO, Matt Cottam. And for the people visiting through the web, “the physical machines create an exciting sense of social presence and “realness”… that a purely digital experience might not.”
Most of us still think about the online world of our computers and smartphones as distinct from the physical world–the blender in my kitchen or the piano in my living room. The Web Lab moves us one step closer to collapsing the distance between the two. It works like this. When you visit the Lab in person or go to the online hub, you’re given a unique ID, a visual Lab Tag, represented by colorful intersecting shapes. This tag functions like a QR code (but is significantly more attractive) and allows users to save the artwork and music they’ve created as well as explore the work that other visitors have made.
Click through the slide show above for images from my favorite Web Lab exhibits and insights from Tellart.
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Jennifer Miller is the author of The Year of the Gadfly (Harcourt, 2012) and Inheriting The Holy Land (Ballantine, 2005). She's a regular contributor to Co.Create.More
