Simmons Hall is an undergraduate dorm at MIT that houses about 400 students. It was designed by Steven Holl Architects and also known as "the sponge" for its porous structure featuring hundreds of little square windows enclosed in a grid like metal frame. Simmons is 116 of these little squares wide and 31 squares tall. On the front facade of Simmons there are 2531 windows. This means that if you try to project video onto it, you end up with a video with 2531 little square holes in it. Here each square becomes an individual pixel of 3ft by 3ft so the resolution of the entire projection is downgraded to 116x31. The porous design of Simmons was meant to regulate sunlight for its residents. It seems to have found an additional purpose in resisting the video that is imposed onto it by filtering it into a super low resolution image. The audio along with the projection is live input from the mic passed through an audio filter resulting in a sound wave with 2531 fraction of a second dropouts per frame.
Collaboration with Josh Higgason (MIT Music and Theater Arts Technical Instructor) Supported by Council of the Arts at MIT
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti2MrP2sbIw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-nW9Y5A094
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS5-e_frVUk
Simmons Hall as an Interactive Canvas Ken Shulman for MIT News
https://news.mit.edu/2022/mit-simmons-hall-interactive-canvas-0525
MIT Architecture News
https://architecture.mit.edu/news/mit-simmons-hall-interactive-canvas
Sponge art MIT Technology Review
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/24/1057242/sponge-art/
Campus Preview Weekend 2022 The Tech
https://thetech.com/2022/04/14/cpw-2022-photos
MIT Simmons Hall - Student Projection Installation Steven Holl Architects https://vimeo.com/719109215