The Thought Wall

The Thought Wall: turn thoughts into art

  Level 3 - Breezeway North (Exterior)

The Thought Wall was commissioned as a generative art piece to support and celebrate the thoughts of students as digital art to be housed within Boola Katitjin. Every day we ask a question in ‘today’s thought’ and turn each answer into code. All the answers mix together in real-time to create the art. It’s a living, breathing work, capturing the thoughts of our students as a whole community.

The thinking behind it

If the students at Murdoch are the student body, the Thought Wall at Boola Katitjin shows the student body’s mind and you can visually see this change during the day, month, year.

The Thought Wall is a generative art piece. It’s digital art, created from students’ thoughts. Every day we ask a question in ‘today’s thought’ and turn each answer into code. All the answers mix together in real-time to create the art. It’s a living, breathing work, capturing the thoughts of our students as a whole community.

The tech behind it

Turning students’ thoughts into The Thought Wall art took some thinking in itself – a combination of many web technologies.

The artwork uses a combination of web technologies. It primarily is using WebGL for the visualisation, housed in an electron application and talking to a backend system. The backend system is a node application backed with a mariadb database, running a REST API. The public facing application is a NextJS website that integrates with the backend system. The backend/public facing applications are all orchestrated through a docker system.