Shift by Media Lab

Shift, an interactive audio visual installation created by Media Lab in 2011. 

"Shift is an array of machines shifting bits and bytes informed by simple and highly repetitive algorithms. Shift pays attention to its environment through the ever-watchful eye of a built-in camera and responds to movement. Changes in state are expressed through audio and visual abstractions." See more;

"During the exhibition, the audience was able to interact with Shift through the build in web-camera of each individual computer. Activity sensed by the camera would result in visual and audible changes animating the audience to further explore the underlying system of the work through different forms of gestures. 

How did the software work? To get started, Andreas prepared a software template, a sketch, that would be used by each individual member of the project. By tweaking and changing parameters and the structure of the software code, new and different mutations of the initial program would emerge. We ended u choosing 20 variations to be displayed. In the next step interactivity was added to the sketches. Since each computer that we were using was equipped with a web camera, we added a code that would allow us to capture, analyze and translate the camera feed into an additional parameter for our sketches."

The algorithms are shaped by Andreas Schlegel, Benson Chong, Darrick Ma, Dhiya Md, Felix Sng, Marvin Liang, Mike Chen, Sid Lim.