Print your laugh and send it to space

Are you a chortler? What about guffaws, giggles or hyena laughs? If you have the best laugh, whatever the joyful sound, it could end up getting turned into a 3D-printed sculpture sent into space. Israeli artist and computer programmer Eyal Gever is leading this collaborative project called #Laugh.

 

3d-printed-laughs
Credit: Eyal Gever on Vimeo

In coming up with #Laugh, Gever had to come up with art that would have universal appeal, literally. The final piece couldn’t be specific to any particular country or culture. His friend, the British spoken word poet Suli Breaks, suggested laughter. Gever is using crowdsourcing to gather laughter submissions and identify the most popular audio, which he’ll turn into a file transmitted to Made In Space’s 3-D printer aboard the ISS. The resulting sculpture will get released into space.

In order to participate, you need to download the free #Laugh app from iTunes, which only works on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices that have iOS 7.0 or later. Laughs submitted through the app have until midnight on December 31 to garner the most “likes” on social media. The crowd-selected laugh audio submission will be announced next month and then heads to the International Space Station in February to emerge as a very strange star.

Source (Alyssa Danigelis, “3D-Print Your Laugh and Launch It Into Space”, LiveScience, 05.12.2016)