Thanatophone (2025)

Date: 2025
Medium: Oscilloscope, aluminium work table, PC, LRAD speaker srray, motors, GPS module, fans, arduino, custom 3D-printed casing and mounts, data-centre access floor tiles, marine compass, python scripts.
Dimensions: 190cm(h) x 65cm(d) x 125cm(w)

Thanatophone is an electronic sculptural assemblage consisting of a stack of computer hardware devices and software algorithms. At its core, the Thanatophone locates its own position on planet Earth relative to overhead GPS satellites in low orbit, concurrently the machine is pulling down weather data to find the hottest places currently on Earth. These locations are correlated with public ecology databases to find names of critically endangered plants that live near those places. Images of these plants are then interpreted by computer vision algorithms and converted to sound, which allows the endangered plants to be drawn on the screen of a laboratory oscilloscope. The sound which produces the live oscilloscope drawings is also played through an LRAD (Long range acoustic device) ‘directional audio’ speaker array, which with the aid of motors, points the sound at the location on Earth where the currently displayed plant is from. LRAD devices when enlarged are being deployed as fascistic crowd control weapons, the scale of device in the Thanatophone merely transmits the audio inside the back of skull of anyone standing in its path.