| Project Description | Meteorite Museum |
The Meteorite Museum - a collaboration between Tod Machover and his group at the MIT Media Lab, Austrian artist/producer Andre Heller, and architects Propeller-Z and Ray Kinoshita - is a radical new project that takes up where the Brain Opera left off. Produced by the Heller Werkstatt corporation in Vienna, Meteorite is a permanent underground museum which opened in Essen, Germany on June 5, 1998. The project truly realizes Richard Wagner's "Gesamtkunstwerk" concept by intricately linking all aspects of the museum design from the outset. Propeller-Z, a young architectural group from Vienna, has designed a completely unique structure: One enters through a gleaming silver "Zeppelin" hovering above ground, either going up stairs into a stylish restaurant, or crossing a bridge into an enormous open cavern, with 5 individual rooms, - each brightly colored and dramatically geometric, all linked by a sinuous network of ramp and walkways, all suspended in mid-air.
Each of the 5 rooms has a permanent aesthetic experience, ranging from a 360-degree spheric and kaleideiscopic presentation of computer graphics images shown reflected on thousands of tiny mirrors, to a "Red Egg" whose walls are covered with fibre optics and shift hue and intensity gradually in a mesmerizing and meditational dance.
Tod Machover has composed original hyper-music for the entire Meteorite Museum which is heard continually as the visitor travels on these walkways and into each experience space. The whole is designed as a radical opera, with the emotional experience created by physically travelling through the museum from beginning to end.
Also, Machover and his team at the MIT Media Lab, with the close collaboration of '97 Media Lab graduate Chris Dodge, are entirely designing the last room which the audience passes through at Meteorite. This special room is called "Transflow", and allows visitors to "play" the room sonically and visually by touching its walls. 100 hand-molded, piezo-electric sensors are mounted in the walls, as well as a special "Conic Table" area with electric field sensing. As in a complex flow of energy, sounds and images are started by touching and rubbing the walls just to the left of the entrance door, and then circulate from left to right around the room - flowing like water or air - as they are transformed, manipulated, split, and recombined by the audience's actions. Unlike the Brain Opera (which consisted of a large collection of individual instruments), the TransFlow Room is designed to be a single, complex instrument - the room itself - meant to be played collaboratively by 10-25 people at a time.