White Light / White Heat

Wheat fields rippled below the Acropolis once more last summer, as Meejin Yoon’s installation played out at its foot. One of nine temporary installations commissioned for the 2004 Olympics, “White Noise/White Light” is a hi-tech re-visioning of agrarian bliss. An assistant professor in the architecture department at MIT and founder of MY Studio, Yoon pursued the commission because she wanted “to explore sound that was somehow filtered and transformed.” She hit on the idea of white noise “out of thin air,” and then decided to couple it with its visual equivalent, white light.

Photography by J. Meejin Yoon

This was no ordinary sound and light show, however. The white lights were LEDs; the white noise was created based on a physical phenomenon called Johnson noise, which is generated by the thermal motions of electrons in a resistor. The noise was amplified by a factor of 100 million to produce the sound for the piece. Yoon and her team installed

approximately 500 stalks of chest-high, semi-flex-ible, fiber-optic strands arranged in a grid; at the base of each stalk was a unit containing a speaker, a passive infrared sensor, and a microprocessor using a software differentiation algorithm to register heat and movement. As pedestrians walked through the field, they left a wake of sound and light.

The highlight, says Matthew Reynolds, an engineer/ manager involved in the project, “came from watching literally hundreds of faces pressed against the fence as we tuned the installation for opening night, asking us (usually in Greek), ‘Can we come in and play?’” —Arwen O’Reilly

>> Meejin Yoon: architecture.mit.edu/people/bg/cvyoon.html

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