Locative media artist Alejo Duque and his colleague Lorenz Schori are working in a very cool project in Luzern, Switzerland, it's called SOUP: the Shapes Of [Un]warped Packages:

S.O.U.P provides a visual and acoustic representation of the omnipresent wireless communication networks which surrounds us in urban spaces. think of our application as a soup ladle spooning arbitrarily up the boiling air and transforming the data into sound and video.

a computer terminal shows a map of the surroundings plus basic points of reference of the city or town that hosts physically our installation. the observer now can jump or fly to some places in the city and choose from different datasets recorded at different daytimes. the software will provide a visual and acoustic representation using surround sound and a beamer.

An example can be found here:

walchedump sound of data gathered on june 22 for the swiss dorkbot hacienda. a simple sinewave cluster is feeded with the distance, the position and the channel of the 60 networks we found. the voices are raising and falling according to our movements. the whole log is played back at a higher rate, so things sound more interesting.

Why do I blog this? I really love the idea of visualizing radio/wireless information flows; it reminds a project by Dunne and Rabby about hertzian spaces I alreads blogged about. Good job Alejo!