Cell Phone Disco: How Cell Phones Can Create Spontaneous Digital Art

For technophiles and curious onlookers alike, WIRED NextFest can be considered one of the best exhibitions out there for showcasing extremely forward-thinking, “Star Trek”-like technology.

WIRED NextFest, which in 2008 comes to Chicago from Sept. 27 to Oct. 12, has one exhibit in particular that just caught my eye. It’s called Cell Phone Disco. WIRED NextFest says about the installation:

Tired of text messages and voicemail? Amsterdam’s Informationlab has found another use for your cell phone: creating digital art.

Cell Phone Disco is an LED installation equipped with sensors that detect the electromagnetic field emitted by active phones and respond with a dazzling light show.

With your own mobile phone, you can even “draw” on a canvas of brilliant red lights. You’d be in good company. After all, Picasso sketched with a flashlight.

This eye-candy technology, though, certainly begs one obvious question: What commercial application does it have in the real world?

At this time, inventors Ursula Lavrencic and Auke Touwslager aren’t quite sure. They say within their Cell Phone Disco blog: “If you’re interested in applying such [an] installation, please contact us.”

The inventors add: “Several thousand lights illuminate when you make or receive a phone call in the vicinity of the installation. Cell Phone Disco makes an invisible property of the environment perceptible to our senses. It reveals the communicating body of the mobile phone.”

Though they may not have figured out how to make money on their invention at this time, Informationlab is on the right track with its thinking. They say: “We need more curiosity-driven research.”

Want to see Cell Phone Disco in full-size action? Feast your eyes on my Cell Phone Disco image gallery.