Category: Installation

Design Informatics Pavilion Facelift

Freelance for Design Informatics
Edinburgh, Scotland 2017

Pictures of the Pavilion by YUXI LIU





Research Through Design 2017 Conference

I will be presenting the project ‘Design with Living Things’ (previously ‘Living with Living Things’) at the Research Through Design 2017 Conference hosted at the National Museum of Scotland (NMS) in Edinburgh between the 22nd and 24th of March 2017.

The paper especially written for the conference with Larissa Pschetz, will be available soon.



Master Degree Show

I contributed to install and design the Design Informatics Master degree show this year. I designed the posters (pictures by BinBin), the label of the different works and put together all the video clips to be projected on the big screen.
The results was great, quite different from the other show as it was set up as an exhibition and not as personal stands. It gave unity and reflected the way the department works.


I created this project, in collaboration with PhD Hadi Mehrpouya, as the final piece of my master thesis.

Please have a look at our WEBSITE to have more informations about the project.
Everyday we get bombarded with data and information from all over the world. Often we feel helpless about our abilities to do things while being trapped in the dilemma of knowing the consequences of our consumptions and choices. Playing on these feelings, SAAD, from Afrikaans meaning Seed, is visualising human deaths as a direct and indirect result of the mining industry and conflict minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), used to build smart-phones and computers. The project is constructed on different layers which all recall the idea of being on the edge, the border between life and death, and emphasise the complexity of nothing being either totally positive or negative. SAAD is composed of two complementary installations: a seed dispenser and a plant, visualising deaths due to the mining industry in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It aims to push the reflexion of the responsibility Western consumer users of smartphones and computers have towards these workers. It plays on the feeling of being helpless towards the different issues our societies are facing. The project is constructed on different layers which all recall the idea of being on the edge, the border between life and death, and emphasise the complexity of nothing being either totally positive or negative. It aims to symbolise the complexity of today’s world and the difficulty to position the self and the ethic in it. We choose to focus on the partial perspective we have of our electronic devices nowadays, as it is something most Europeans possessed and use everyday without questioning the impact it can have on other human beings and the natural environment.

Projects transforming data into sound/music

Spider silk makes music at MIT

with few tones you can play them and realise is it a piece of music, but if you play individual tones it doesn’t mean anything
combination – control – structure – in space and time
they create there own music to reflect some materials
use the molecular system to create the music



Artist Lisa Park manipulates water with her mind

Intersting to get direction on how interprete data
EEG headset to monitor the delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves of her brain as well as eye movements and transformed the resulting data with specialized software into sound waves.



Traces by James Alliban

Traces is an exploring art piece of motion, which makes the audience both the performer and the audio-visual composer of this interactive installation. The interaction makes the piece a sort of crowd-sourced performance artwork in which people’s movement creates a role reversal of the traditional dynamic of artist as performer and audience as observer. The user’s movements are captured as data and translated in real time into colourful particles and immersive sounds by David Kamp.



Music from very short programs




Sound garden

Sound Garden engages the viewer/participant in the familiar extended mediation device of audio amplification through the use of microphones and multiple speaker arrays. The participants and observers, however, discover that their interactions transform the invisible motion of sound into visible form.
A Pure data program was used to shift the pitch of audio input to sub audible levels enabling the speakers to move in response to the participants interactions, bringing a visible form to the physical presence of their sound in the environment.




Higgs boson data turned into music at CERN

Seven physicists from CERN created a composition based on measurements from inside the Large Hadron Collider the results were surprisingly traditional, with even a hint of baroque. The scientists are shown playing harps and violins beside the huge particle accelerator in which the Higgs boson was discovered last year.
The music is based on the translation of scientific data collected by the four main Large Hadron Collider experiments in a process known as sonification.
Sonfication works by assigning a musical note to each measurement created by experiments, so that the same data is presented as a musical score.




This artwork responds to the current size and timing of the waves of the closet ocean of its current location. Every half hour the most current data from the closet ocean buoy station is downloaded. Custom software uses the current wave height and dominant wave period data from the buoy and transforms that information into a low frequency sound wave. As the size and timing of the waves in the ocean change so does the frequency of the sound waves produced by the software. These sound waves shake a bowl of water sitting on top of a speaker. This shaking produces wave patterns in the bowl that are captured by a video camera modified by the software and projected onto a wall. As the waves in the ocean change size and frequency the waves in the bowl will also change. This results in continuous variations of the shapes and patterns that one sees and hears which also reflects the constant changing conditions of the ocean.



Video and Sound Help Turn Astronomical Data into Art





Musical Sculptures Translate Weather Data Into Art

Visualizations of music, creative takes on notation, and physical data art are all running fixations at Brain Pickings. Naturally, the work of Boston-based artist Nathalie Miebach, one of this year’s crop of extraordinary TED Global Fellows, is an instant favorite. Miebach translates weather and climate change data from cities into musical scores, which she then translates into vibrant, whimsical sculptures and uses them as the basis for collaboration with musicians across a wide spectrum of styles and genres.
“Musical notation allows me a more nuanced way of translating information without compromising it. She uses these scores to collaborate with musicians across a wide spectrum of styles and genres.” ~ Nathalie Miebach


Sound of nature

Artists, scientists and designers collaborate on different projects to explore the sound of nature.

Like a person gasping for air when it’s in short supply, living trees make noises when they are running out of water, and a team of French scientists is a step closer to pinpointing the noises. Lab experiments at Grenoble University in France have isolated ultrasonic pops, which are 100 times faster than what a human can hear, in slivers of dead pine wood bathed in a hydrogel to simulate the conditions of a living tree.

The findings could lead to the design of a handheld device that allows people to diagnose stressed trees using only microphones. Such a device may be particularly important if droughts become more common and more severe, as many global warming models predict they will.


While listening to the headphones hanging from the trees branches you can hear water being pulled up from the roots to the leaves through the xylem tubes.  You will hear a quiet popping sound that is produced by the water passing through the cells of the Xylem tubes and cavitating as it mixes with air on its’ way upwards. A deep rumbling sound that is produced by the tree moving vibrating.
The ‘Tree Listening Project’ aims to provide an experience that links both science and art by engaging the public with what happens inside a tree, and to excite and inspire a keen interest in trees.


  • Finally, it is symphony of sounds from the Washington Park Arboretum called ‘Music of Trees’ – streams gurgling, flies dancing on a microphone, squirrels rustling through the underbrush – has been transformed. by the composer Abby Aresty. The music is part natural, part imagined.

 Aresty writes, “When I began working on this site I was excited to explore sounds of new life around this gigantic fallen limb . . . On a few occasions I brought a homemade contact microphone to this site. (Like its name suggests, it picks up sounds by touch rather than through the air.) Though I was outwitted by many an ant – they refused to climb over it – the flies loved it. When they landed on the small disk I was able to capture the normally inaudible rhythmic patterns the flies create as they dance about.”

Comes alive


Ephemerā by Mischer’Traxler consists of an oak table and two mirrors, decorated with water jet-cut metal shapes of leaves, flowers and insects that appear and disappear depending on visitors’ proximity to the installation.

“When a visitor gets too close, all the elements hide away and become very functional again. Once you step back they become very alive and more decorative.” Thomas Traxler adds: “If you are in a forest and a deer is running by, if it detects you or if it knows you are there, it runs away and hides. We wanted to recreate that moment. If you are in a forest and a deer is running by, if it detects you or if it knows you are there, it runs away and hides. We wanted to recreate that moment.” “The species that are used on the table and on the mirror area all related to real species,” he added. “Some are extinct and some are very common plants that can be found all over the planet, while others are newly discovered species. So it’s also about the impact of humanity on nature, and the impact we have.” The leaves and insects on the table lie flat when people are nearby, but rise up as soon as they move away, powered by small embedded motors.

Text from Dezeen