Last year, the folks over at Brooklyn-based design agency Hush welcomed 2013 with “100 Wishes”: a visual representation of 100 individuals’ wishes for the new year, “generated by reverberating viscous paint in water.” As a follow up, this year they’ve created “Release 2014,” a similarly inspired project that instead utilizes digital technology in its process.
The new project “paints a portrait of emotional release, using recordings of brief vocal utterances and custom software to generate bursts of color that vary their shape based on timbre, volume, and other unique identifiers.” For “Release 2014,” HUSH asked 100 people to express their feelings about the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014 with a brief utterance, acting as a vocal “release.” These vocal utterances were then fed through the software to create unique digital images based on the sounds; the digital images were then transferred to analog to make 200 limited-edition prints.
You can check out the 90 second case study of the project above. It documents HUSH’s intriguing process, as well as some of the end results. This would be easy to dismiss as just a gimmick, if the releases themselves weren’t so aesthetically pleasing and interesting. If you’re interested in checking out a selection of some of the most powerful releases you can do so here. It’s well worth a quick perusal, as you’re not likely to see something like it anywhere else.