Troika is a multi-disciplinary art and design practice founded in 2003 by Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel, who met while studying at the Royal College of Art in London.
This project, SMS Guerilla Projector, is about four years old, but it caught my eye while flipping through my copy of the Design and the Elastic Mind book. The SMS Guerilla Projector does what you’re seeing above, basically project the screen image from a Nokia phone onto surfaces around the city. The project is somewhat reminiscent of the Image Fulgurator, which I posted on back in July of 2008.
Most speculation on the interwebs suggest it’s basically a hacked phone and slide projector mashed together, which is kind of ingenious in its simplicity. Basically, and LCD screen can have light pass through it and so by opening up a phone and shining some concentrated light at the screen, so the speculation goes, you would be able to project the image with a lens.
Some other notable and interesting projects of theirs that you should check out: The Tool for Armchair Activists, SMS Memory Wall, and Exploded Monologues.
Hey, this is way cool.
Is there a BCL model on the way? There should be!
It can be done. I’ve got one in the basement – a cheap portable DVD player, an old slide projector for a light source, a dollar store lens and scrap wood.
Ugly and big but it works. Got pics if you’d like to get an idea of what a crude version looks like.
Any slide projector I had would die if you moved it around while it was on and hot. But the ones I had were old and used very old bulbs. I wonder if technology has improved any so that movement won’t damage the bulbs. Then again, I guess there isn’t much use for slide projectors anymore since they hardly make slide film anymore.