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# A Floating Sound Orb Transmits the Past to the Future
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/a-floating-sound-orb-transmits-the-past-to-the-future/
- Published: 2014-04-09T12:58:39.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:33:39.000Z
- Description: Some people think that ghosts are fragments from people's lives imprinted on the world, playing over and over again after death. A sound project evokes this idea of a "delayed echo" of activity with a dreamlike black orb that floats through the air.
- Author: Allison Meier
- Tags: Art, sound, Urban Interventions, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:03 (2014, 2015, part 1)

![Space Replay](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/04/spacereplay4.jpg)

“Space Replay” (all images courtesy Francesco Tacchini, Julinka Ebhardt, and Will Yates-Johnson)

Some people think that ghosts are fragments from people’s lives imprinted on the world, playing over and over again after death. A sound project evokes this idea of a “delayed echo” of activity with a dreamlike black orb that floats through the air.

“[Space Replay](http://ied.rca.ac.uk/de-computation/space-replay?ref=hyperallergic.com)” was created by graduate student Francesco Tacchini with Julinka Ebhardt and Will Yates-Johnson from [Design Products](http://designproducts.rca.ac.uk/platforms/platform-21/?ref=hyperallergic.com) as part of the [Information Experience Design](http://ied.rca.ac.uk/?ref=hyperallergic.com) program at the Royal College of Art in London. As Tacchini explained to [Gizmag](http://www.gizmag.com/space-replay-floating-sound-sphere/31128/?ref=hyperallergic.com), they wanted to examine people’s relationships to ambient and environmental sounds with an object “that could augment or disrupt that experience.”

![Space Replay](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/04/spacereplay3.jpg)

Watching “Space Replay” creep by (click to enlarge)

In February the group filmed the orb slowly descending in the center of a staircase while transmitting the voices of the departed, hovering through the South Kensington pedestrian tunnel and streaming its soundtrack of phantom voices, even joining a woman for an elevator ride while radioing a bland conversation as company. All the while, “Space Replay” appears like some surreal specter warping reality — a modernist descendent of the white sphere “[Rover](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rover%5F%28The%5FPrisoner%29?ref=hyperallergic.com)” from the 1960s British TV show *The Prisoner*.

![The components of "Space Replay"](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2014/04/spacereplay1.jpg)

The components of “Space Replay”

The construction of “Space Replay” is relatively simple. The body is a latex black balloon filled to [neutral buoyancy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral%5Fbuoyancy?ref=hyperallergic.com), meaning to the same density of the air; this way it can glide on the air currents and seem to move of its own accord. Inside its inflated body is a battery-powered Arduino and Adafruit Wave Shield hacked to record and play back sounds. The result is like a smaller-scale version of last year’s [“Voice Tunnel” by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer](http://hyperallergic.com/78810/giving-a-voice-to-a-usually-off-limits-tunnel/), where visitors recorded their voices, which were then transmitted back minutes later in waves through the tunnel, mixed with some of the uncanny eeriness of [Berndnaut Smilde’s clouds](http://www.berndnaut.nl/works.htm?ref=hyperallergic.com) manifesting in rooms.

Tacchini told Hyperallergic that the group will discuss the project during the [Boring Conference](http://boringconference.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com) in London in May and is continuing to develop prototypes in the coming months to improve “Space Replay.”