Have you ever wanted to sit on a wall of sound? At the 2013 São Paolo Design Week last month, a Brazilian artist-designer put a real-time spin on his Nóize Chair concept, which merges ambient sound with design, by hooking up a microphone to a 3-D printer and building an audio-warped chair in front of conventiongoers’ eyes.
In 2012, architect Guto Requena partnered with Galeria Coletivo Amor de Madre to create the first Nóize Chairs. The seats are a kind of audio-physical mashup that mixes three classic Brazilian chair designs that have been scanned and digitally modeled with audio files from different areas of São Paolo (Grajaú, Cidade Tiradentes, and Santa Ifigênia) using custom software. The resulting chairs are expressions of the city, mixing the function of Brazilian furniture with urban life, as Requena says in the comments under the project’s YouTube video:
São Paulo is a beautiful city. Non-obvious, complex, diverse, multiracial, improvised, surprising, ironic, tolerant towards different peoples, beliefs and cultures–a patchwork filled with hidden beauties. Falling in love with it is a matter of survival.
The three pieces developed by Estudio Guto Requena for the exhibition seek to assimilate the beauties of São Paulo, especially those which are off circuit. They constitute a digital experimentation of noises, deconstruction and mixing through the new possibilities brought to us by new digital technologies.
For SPDW 2013, Estudio Guto Requena partnered with META-D to put this audio-structural transformation on display as Live Nóize: A Design Performance. A CAD file depicting the Girafa chair (one of the classic models used in 2012) was projected on a wall for conventioneers to manipulate via microphone, resulting in freaky spikes and spazzy perversions in the files. The microphones also picked up ambient chatter and buzz, using the entire convention environment as input to distort the chair’s design.
After being processed by Grasshopper, a graphical algorithm editor tightly integrated with Rhino’s 3-D modeling tools, a Metamaquina 2 3-D printer made miniature models of the hybrid designs.
[Poster image by Thiago Mangialardo]
