Take a seat … and the city’s pulse
As visitors to the Graduate School of Design’s (GSD) Gund Hall approach the puzzling blanket of concrete installed by the Quincy Street entrance this semester, the mound — or is it a bench? — buzzes and throbs.
Titled “PULSUS,” the enigmatic piece is described by its designer as a form of “perceptual artificial intelligence.” It gathers real-time data on city activity, such as traffic patterns and what residents are doing and feeling, from various sources and translates the information into soundscapes.
Allen Sayegh, associate professor in practice of architectural technology, spoke with the GSD about his installation and what it might signal in a world increasingly invested in artificial intelligence.
GSD: From the visitor’s perspective, you see this structure and you sense that it’s communicating in some way, or at least buzzing and pulsing. Where are these signals coming from?
SAYEGH: “PULSUS” gathers data from different sources — real-time police conversations, tweets from around the community, among others — and then translates these into different types of tonal sounds, producing the buzzing that you can hear and feel when you’re close to it. When we had it in SoHo in New York over the summer, it also sent out bursts of mist to cool off visitors.
To create these effects, we’re drawing from different types of tweets that are geo-tagged around the city. We’re looking at language, especially the emojis that are being used, which we quantify with different values, which then are coded to produce sounds.
We wanted to generate an experience that resonates on an emotional ground level. The process has been very much a blend between analyzing quantitative data and designing an experience. And at the end, the resulting piece acts essentially as a conch shell for urban activity, or as a stethoscope: a new way to listen in to the city’s activity, and a concrete interface with a feedback system that is almost like a musical instrument. There are different metaphors people have been using to describe it, but the idea is to sense the pulse of the city.