Commissioned for Friday Late at the V&A's Cold War Modern event (October 08), the Stealth Project uses NOVA (a 3D grid of LEDs) to display a 3 dimensional dynamic light-based visualisation.

Planes, missiles and other hardware that deflect or otherwise avoid radar detection were key in the race for world supremacy. Detection avoidance, or stealth technology, was one of many ‘developments’ to emerge from the Cold War.

In the Stealth project, two grids of triggers target and launch missiles across an abstracted 3D space at each other, attempting to avoid radar detection and annihilate the opposition.

However, in contrast to the Mutually Assured Destruction madness of the arms race, the piece acts as a collaborative spatial musical instrument – each ‘missile’ emits sounds based on its relative position and the conditions it encounters along its trajectory.

The Stealth Project developed from research into the creative possibilities of volumetric, or 3D, visualisation techniques. Recent Squidsoup experiments using a Baby NOVA (the physical centrepiece of this project) suggested that this kind of three-dimensional light grid has considerable potential for abstract gaming applications.

The piece is a collaboration with ETH Zurich and horao GmbH, and features their NOVA 3D LED grid.

It also features 2 Monome64 interfaces.

squidsoup.org/stealth
nova.ethz.ch
horao.biz
monome.org