Voice modulated high-frequency ultrasound creates a star in a jar.
Eon
Receiving a 2003 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship Award, and the University of California's Hellman Award for Research Distinction in 2001, Eon uses the mysterious phenomenon of sonoluminescence - the process by which sound in liquid can be converted directly into light - and the Internet to extend my current artistic research in the fields of telepresence and telepistemology; the way we know, construct, and trust experiences mediated by technology.
Eon's design allows museum and telepresent visitors via the Internet to send short poetic e-mails to the exhibition site and have them converted via text-to-speech into speech-encoded high intensity ultrasound. Modified with a sub-carrier, the high-frequency ultrasound source in turn modulates a 1000ml glass vessel filled with de-gassed ultra-pure water. Like a vise, the intense sound field creates a series of high and low-pressure nodes inside vessel, trapping and crushing a bubble of gas at the center of the glass cylinder.
The dramatic process causes the bubble to rapidly collapse and then form again thousands of times a second. As the original translated voice initiates and sustains the creation of a tiny "starlike" sonoluminescent light source floating at the center of the glass cylinder, photonics and electronic instruments convert the tiny star's visible light back again into audible words.
Museum visitors wear specially designed headphones that allow them to listen directly to the light source, their own text emitted from the starlight, or the voices of the telepresent visitors around the world radiating from the tiny star. A live digital video microscopy system routes the star image to a high resolution data projector in the exhibition space, and simultaneously streams it to the Internet. Visitors can watch streaming video of the tiny light source created and modulated with their own words, as well as see the light and hear the voices of others from around the planet that is creating the star in a jar.
The inexplicability of this rare phenomenon (sonoluminescence by current physical theory cannot be fully explained) is carefully combined with the disbelief we harbor concerning the power of simulation technologies. Eon amplifies lingering questions on the nature of belief, beauty and the fidelity of digital experience, and asks whether the nearly unbelievable natural phenomenon at the core of the project is more believable than the sophisticated technological systems that help create and sustain it.