Sean’s latest project, Volume And Noise, consist of a ’30s Philco radio modified to speak tweets in real time.

Volume And Noise is the latest device in my series of interactive, social media scraping art pieces. It is a contraption that reads tweets based on a set of user defined search terms in real time. For this show at the AFRU Gallery in Portland Oregon (on display for the month of November, 2012) all of the search terms are political in nature for an election timed political art show. The search terms could however be any combination of ideas desired and easily changed by the user on the fly. The piece is built into the chassis of an antique 1930’s era Philco radio and includes updates such as a modern amp, an Arduino microcontroller and a highly modified antique meter which now presents the user with the Tweets per Minute (T.P.M.) count of the piece with a period appropriate custom face. All of the audio including the radio static, tuning sounds and filtering to produce the antique sound of the radio is all happing through digital processing in real time.