If you ever played Galaga in your local arcade growing up, you know the premise—a fixed shooter platform where you blast enemy spaceships until you run out of quarters.

Jiffer Harriman’s adaptation does away with the need for coins and swaps spaceships for sounds, all while keeping the look, feel—and durability—of an arcade game.

“Those things are made to withstand abuse,” said Harriman, a lecturer of media production at the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information, with a laugh. “That’s a real practical reason to use stuff like this for public art projects.”

Harriman (ElEngr’02, PhDTecMedSoc’16) is both an artist and an engineer who creates public works of art, particularly in the realm of sound. For Galaga’s Ghost, that meant creating an arcade cabinet with simple buttons and joysticks so that up to six people at a time can make music together, with each station controlling a different “instrument.”

“What I enjoy about this is creating moments of musical joy,” he said. “It’s fun to see people who are maybe hesitant to approach this thing, they start pushing buttons and suddenly, they’re like, ‘I’m doing this, I’m the one who’s making this sound.’ I love seeing people having fun with it.”

Players crowd around Galaga’s Ghost on Pearl Street. Photo by Jiffer Harriman.

Earlier this fall, Galaga’s Ghost, which was sponsored by Boulder’s Experiments in Public Art program, was exhibited on the Pearl Street Mall and in the Museum of Boulder, where it will remain on display. It’s also been to the Boulder farmer’s market and the Tulagi music festival.

This project isn’t Harriman’s first piece of public work. One he’s particularly proud of is Aesthetic Algorithms, which he showcased at the Dairy Arts Center. It’s a series of networked boxes that generate visuals and sound based on how close a viewer gets to the piece.

Approachable interactions

That piece was successful because it had a low bar to clear—just standing in front of it activates it, though it gets increasingly responsive the closer you get to the work. For something more participatory, like Galaga’s Ghost, Harriman—working with fellow media production lecturer Sean Winters—had to build something to override our hard-coded aversion to touching anything in a museum.

“It goes back to my interest in building interactions that are approachable,” he said. “Arcade interfaces, in general, are understandable. People know how a joystick and buttons work. And I think a glowing arcade button is less intimidating than if it had a piano on it.”

Harriman’s passion for getting the public to play with sound comes from his own love of music. From the moment he picked up a guitar in high school, he was hooked.

“My choice to do electrical engineering was influenced by my interest in music—I thought I’d be building guitar amps, or something like that,” Harriman said.

Jiffer Harriman

While he did work as an engineer, it wasn’t long before Harriman returned to academia to explore music as a career path. That led him to Stanford’s Center for Computer Research and Music Acoustics, where he was able to learn about sound art and interactive sound.

“My engineering mindset is usually about solving problems—the explaining it is usually left to other people,” he said. “If you put something in a gallery, it’s important that people be able to figure it out. They’re not going to read a manual.”

Years of working in the public space, he said, have given him a sense of better understanding what resonates with passers by, and in the case of Galaga’s Ghost, a chance to improve on his original 2021 design by making it more intuitive and robust, and more approachable to people looking to get involved. In the future, he and Winters would love to see it become part of a live performance.

“I love the conversations between strangers experimenting with it, when they start to teach each other what’s happening,” Harriman said. “When people encounter art in an unexpected way, like on a sidewalk, it has the opportunity to connect in a different way than if you go to a gallery or museum, where you expect to see art.

“I just love the idea of building something other people can engage with, even if they’re not musicians.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.