Give a room full of monkeys some typewriters and an infinite
amount of time and you'll eventually get the complete works of
Shakespeare. Lacking that kind of patience, not to mention the
requisite number of bananas or desire to clean up after monkeys,
the creative minds at Lab[au] built a robot that does
the same thing. Called Signal-to-noise, the installation
combines the Oxford English Dictionary and a Jet Age
wayfinding technology to capture order in chaos.
Inside an aluminium structure, roughly the size of a narrow body
airline cabin, 512 vintage split-flap letter mechanisms are arrayed
in four rows at eye height. Controlled by a hidden computer, each
of the individual mechanisms flip continuously through letters
until the software recognises that a word has been formed by
The computer freezes those nodes and flips their colour to red
while the others continue to cascade, revealing a hidden signal
among the noise. "As artists we try to extract the character of our
time, to give contemporaneity a form and a meaning," says Lab[au]
principle Manuel Abendroth. "The circular installation invites the
visitor to plunge into an audio-visual composition right in the
centre of a calculation process of an auto-poetic machine."
Three and four letter terms are most common, though a cuss word
filter has been added to keep the installation family friendly.
Longer words appear regularly, but so far none of the Bard's
sonnets have appeared fully formed, or even a line from a killer
Signal-to-noise is an impressive feat from a technical and
financial perspective. Split-flap modules cost about $160 (£97) --
or $22,000 (£134,000) for a single tweet. Luckily, a cache of these
kinematic characters was discovered in a train station in Belgium,
still functional after 50 years of neglect. They were offered to
Lab[au] for a promise that they produce an installation with
Split-flaps haven't been a big part of the tech world since the
mid-1960s, but they have surprising cultural potency. The TV
series Lost featured them to dramatic effect,
travel site Kayak features the anachronistic technology prominently
in their ads, and even Apple made great use of them in their user
interface until iOS 7 purged all traces of skeuomorphism. They were
the inspiration for the mid-line flipping behavior on
Lab[au] has several theories as to why this Kennedy-era
technology still captures the imagination in an age of omnipresent
iPhones. "The refreshment of the board takes time, as a 'slow'
technology it attracts our curiosity and imagination," says
Abendroth. "Most people still recall the excitement when the gate
number or the arrival hour finally appeared."
There is also a game-like experience where viewers try to find
the patterns alongside the robot. "It's a splurge of
un-understandable information gradually being rendered
understandable," says Lab[au] principle Els Vermang. "The notion of
cracking the code is an inspiring intelligence intrigue."
"It's a technology that embodies its time," says Vermang.
"Split-flaps, with their splitting symbols and flapping sound, no
other devices have shaped more our imagination about globalisation
and mobility. They're understandable devices from an era where
technology was understandable."
These analog, alphanumeric displays dictated the travel fates of
millions until low-cost LED displays offered superior control,
flexibility, and price advantages. However, Abendroth believes
emotion rather than pure technical performance could keep split
flaps from their final destination. "We face a nostalgia towards
mid-century positivism of seemingly mastered global economy and
PanAm world exploration," he says. "They constitute 'the' link
between the printed character and the dematerialised screen
This story originally appeared on Wired.com