The New SMS: Smoke Messaging System

New technology from architecture and design studio Minimaforms combines cutting edge communication with its most primitive form. It allows you to project SMS messages onto smoke plumes, forming text signals in the sky. The system was installed in two locations at the OFFLOAD festival in Bristol, England last month.

From Creative Review:

Participants engage in a collective act of writing space through the use of light as a virtual writing machine onto ephemeral plumes of smoke,” explain Minimaforms. In other words, onlookers can text messages which are then displayed using light projected into plumes of smoke. Their texts “are fed through dynamic coding that recognizes, archives and plays back a real time visualization. This visualization is then grafted onto trajectories of smoke that form a dynamic ephemeral field that is affected by all external forces in the space of performance. Through turbulence the smoke writes or erases the grafting of the inputted text.”

SMS is becoming a trend in the art and design space. We told you about the SMS mirror, which allows you to send messages on top of a reflected image. There is also the SMS Guerilla Projector that can display texts on a variety of public spaces. It’s interesting to note that as art and design melds with tech, they are also becoming more collective and collaborative in nature. This trajectory parallels that of the web with wikis, blogs, and crowdsourcing. For those who say that technology is making us more socially awkward, just look at these new social tools that are cleaving us together in a variety of spaces and disciplines.

[via Boing Boing]