If you don’t know her work, computer scientist Monique “Evette” Byars has built spectacular, animated instruments, merging digital modeling and fabrication techniques. Flowers bloom. Guitars are reimagined as koi ponds. Sounds get transformed into wearable resin structures. It’s enough to make you want to up your airbrush, math, and science games.
Here’s a glimpse of the harp-with-blooming flowers:
Here’s her capsule explanation of her practice. Bonus — music in Strudel, the friendly live-coding tool! (Also the delicious pastry, but that’s not applicable here.)
New York-based Monique Evette aka Monique Byars isn’t just making eye-popping inventions; she’s also advocating for science. That includes making elegant beating heart purses while also opening up about cardiology, health issues, and denoising signals. (The world needs health monitoring devices like this!) And that means appearances at places like Boston’s Museum of Science to inspire folks on the topic.
And she spoke to the science-focused Blow My Mind Show, hosted by scientist-and-standup-comedian (yes, both) Sarah Adelman. Sharks! CDM = Chondrichthyes’ Digital Musings, of course. Always has. If you disagree, Jaws here would like a word.
On TikTok and their embeds are a little wonky; direct link.
But let’s head back a few years to the project for making STL files out of audio. There’s something refreshing about going back to the pre-Claude/pre-Codex era. And the combination of NumPy and Python is a perfectly human-friendly way to tackle this problem. The readme goes into some self-reflection about how to incorporate political themes without being appropriative, which I agree is necessary. But I’ll wager someone out there in the CDM readerverse was already gazing at a 3D printer, wondering how to do this, and maybe looking through some human code by hand written by an identifiable computer scientist individual is what you need.
This all also gives me some serious NYC maker nostalgia. It’s good the light is still very, very alive!
https://github.com/mdbyars/generateSTL
Here’s a longer video on that project:
And more links, including a shop/portfolio with resin sculptures based on sound and water dynamics:
https://linktr.ee/evettesniche