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On a 2004 visit to the MIT Media Lab, I encountered a small, flat wall with a skin of silver luminescent triangles covering a background of cables and metal frame. My host, the creator of Hyposurface, Mark Goulthorpe (dECOi Architects, and Professor at MIT) turned on the compressor, causing forced air to begin firing the pistons that pushed the triangular components of the skin outward at high speed. The stationary wall had been transformed into a dynamic surface of drops, text, and transient shapes, shapeshifting from one edge to the other.
Goulthorpe had been developing Hyposurface for several years, having shown it at CeBit in Hanover, and at the Venice Biennale: his intention was to build “the world’s first display system where the screen physically moves.”
Read more in the print edition.
Image: Audience members interact with the movement of Hyposurface at the 2007 BIO International Convention in Boston, Massachusetts.
Paul Steenhuisen (Vancouver, 1965) studied with Keith Hamel (DMA, UBC), Louis Andriessen (Royal Conservatory, The Hague), Michael Finnissy (Hove), and Tristan Murail (IRCAM, Paris). He is a laureate of more than a dozen national and international awards, including four prizes in the CBC Young Composers Competition, seven in the PROCAN/SOCAN Competition, first prize in the Vancouver New Music Composers Competition, and the Governor General of Canada Gold Medal as the outstanding student in all faculties (UBC, 1990). In 2011, Paul Steenhuisen was awarded the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award as the outstanding mid-career artist in music (Canada Council for the Arts).