When the artist Sissel Marie Tonn developed the idea of The Intimate Earthquake Archive art installation, she was looking for a system that can detect the precise position of a person moving around between objects evenly distributed in a small courtyard. The system had to be weather proof, easy to install/maintain, safe and inexpensive. A system meeting these demands did not exist, and I got the job of developing and producing it over a period og 3 month in 2016.
Basically the system consists of transmitting antennas placed in each of the 12 hanging stone core samples (the objects in the picture above), and 3 receivers placed in the vests carried by the persons moving around between the objects. The person will experience an earthquake composition, via transducer directly on the body, determined by the position. The transducer electronics and the compositions was developed by Jonathan Reus-Brodsky. Here is Sissel Marie Tonn in front of the three vests:
The Proximity System is still under development, since the installation is now being duplicated and transferred to other exhibitions. New features, better PCB’s and more reliable components are introduced, but the principle of operation is still based on very weak AM-modulated signals, each of them transmitted with exact same amplitude and phase, and modulated with a strange new protocol that I invented for this purpose.
This is the prototype transmitter box with all the cables connecting to the antennas in the core samples:
