Sprechen sie popcorn? Do you speak popcorn?
Do you speak popcorn? (How about whale?) The Talking Popcorn Machine by Nina Katchadourian interprets the burst patterns of popping corn into Morse code. “I remembered that the doomed sailors on the Russian submarine Kursk had tried tapping out messages on the hull,” said Nina Katchadourian. “If this was possible, it must be a matter of pacing the knocking differently in order to communicate long/short marks. This is in fact what Talking Popcorn does: it listens to a series of pops in a group, taking a running average of the amount of silence that follows each pop, and then designates each of those pops as a dot or a dash. Measuring the lengths of silence in groups also helps account for the acceleration that happens as the kernels heat up and pop and peak speed and density.” [GT]
Talking Popcorn Machine [via we make money not art]
