Oasis: a virtual pond of synthetic life forms
"A surface covered with black sand turns into a pool full of life when people grab and remove a handful of sand away. In this micro–world, virtual creatures are born, live and perish.They recognize their spatial boundaries and obstacles of living and respond to peoples' touch in various ways.
A real–time computer vision engine has been developed to interpret the physical status of diverse materials of the installation. The program populates creatures with various characteristics and controls their behaviors in real–time. A swarm intelligence has been implemented to simulate the flocking behaviors of the creatures and their life–like motions.
The Oasis is not a device invented for people to 'use'. It's a playful space where people feel nature, find life forms, interact with and create virtual worlds. It elicits peoples' basic instincts to touch natural materials."
(Yunsil Heo and Hyunwoo Bang)
CONTRIBUTOR
Anna TroisiSHARE
.fluid: speculative proposal for a touch-friendly interface
"Imagine surfaces start to communicate with you. Your mobile gets goose skin when your lover texts you. Your WiFi controller changes the look and feel of it's surface according to different game situations. Your sofa gives you a short massage as a warm welcome when you return home from a hard day of work. Your laptop feels dried out when battery status is getting low.
.fluid is a concept study of an interacting, changing surface. While getting Input from the hands of its spectators, it's surface changes from liquid to solid, from plain to three–dimensional symmetric patterns. It provokes you to get in touch with it, to play with it's open interface and to collaborate with other people to find out how far you can push it.
This object was the result of the two week project »Talk to me–Form follows mood« supervised by Prof. Andreas Muxel at KISD (Köln International School of Design)."
(Hannes Kalk, 2013)
CONTRIBUTOR
Anna TroisiSHARE
Touch me, hold me: Franz West's anti-modernist aesthetic
"'Don't Touch' is an unspoken warning in any art museum. Sometimes an institution might post a sign explaining to visitors why touching the art on view is bad – not just for the obvious catastrophic reasons, but because even oils from hands that appear to be clean can cause incremental damage. Mostly, though, visitors already know what they are (or, rather, aren't) supposed to do in art's presence.
Touch is a privilege typically reserved for the artist who made the art, as well as its professional caretakers. In fact, 'the artist's touch' has been a central value in Western art for hundreds of years.
By the start of the 1960s, with the Abstract Expressionist generation of American painters riding high, it had even become something of a fetish. The loaded brush, the whiplash line, poured paint, the palette knife and sponge – signs of distinctive gestures mattered, almost like handwriting. De–mythologizing the artist's touch was left to Andy Warhol, who announced that he instead wanted to be a machine, and to Sol LeWitt and his idea–oriented cohort of Conceptual artists. They pulled the plug for good.
Enter Franz West, the impish Viennese artist whose compelling retrospective is at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Born in 1947, West is a generation younger than Warhol and LeWitt. The fetish for the artist's touch having been retired just before he arrived on the scene, he took the next step. In the mid–1970s, West handed things over to the audience.
Literally.
Wrapping pieces of wood and cardboard and lengths of wire with gauze, coating it in plaster or papier mâché and painting the whole thing white, West made sculptures that the audience was meant to pick up, manipulate, examine at close range, hang on an arm or around the neck, or even stick one's face into. The shapes are abstract. But often, part of the sculpture suggests a handle – a direct visual invitation to audience participation. Silently it says, Touch me, hold me.
Other shapes appear designed to fit around the neck, under the arm or on other embraceable parts of the body. Or, they echo bodily orifices. (Can a sculpture have a belly button?) A glass bottle at the end of a long stick, both embedded in lumpy papier mâché, looks like a ritual implement meant to be passed around in some primitive religious ceremony.
These materials also evoke the damaged condition art holds in contemporary life. Like a cast made for a broken limb, white plaster and gauze result in sculptures bound in a medical dressing.
West calls these sculptures 'Passstücke' –– originally translated as 'fitting pieces' (passende Stücke) but now referred to as 'adaptives.' In biology, adaptation is a structure or form modified to fit a changing environment. West's touch–me sculptures attempted the same for art's new circumstance."
(Los Angeles Times, 31 March 2009)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Fleshmap: Studies of Desire
"Fleshmap is an inquiry into human desire, its collective shape and individual expressions. In a series of studies, we explore the relationship between the body and its visual and verbal representation.
Touch investigates the collective perception of erogenous zones. We asked hundreds of people to rank how good it would feel to touch or be touched by a lover in different points of the body. The resulting images reveal a map of sensual desire with multiple focal points and islands of excitement. Read more about our method.
While Touch examines collective patterns, Look explores individuality and the hidden surprises that each body reveals when bared. Through a process of abstraction, the piece reveals the multiplicity of formal possibilities contained in a single body part. Contours from different individuals are presented in collections that expose both familiar and oft–overlooked patterns, confronting prototypical notions of ourselves. Read more about our method.
Listen investigates the relationship between language and the body. Verbal manifestations of human physicality in music, poetry, and religion are distilled to their basic elements. In a play with language, the 'body rebus' emerges as a visual representation of cultural expressions of the physical in us."
(Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Charmed: Tangible Virtual Life Simulation 2007
"The touch sensitive screens of Charmed offer intimate views into a virtual world accessed via three glowing resin pods. Each pod provides an entry point to inhabitants of suburban neighbourhoods, apartment buildings and city spaces. Within these highly evolved snow domes, a black and white linear aesthetic depicts a world populated by mesmerized figures carrying out the routine tasks required of their environments. Haptic gestures, like touching or tapping, provide a pathway into the spaces and a connection with the cultures, uncovering the diminutive details of the lives of these animated figures. Touching the screen can break the spell and provoke change. Repeated tapping can cause chaos, disrupting lives, forcing computers to malfunction and causing traffic accidents. Tapping can impact inhabitants, even causing a man to drink so much that the inevitable happens and he wets his pants. In Charmed each portal offers an impression of omnipotence as private lives and public spaces are exposed and controlled by our touch."
(Priscilla Bracks, Gavin Sade and Matt Dwyer)
Fig.1 Footage recorded by Gavin Sade and Priscilla Bracks at ISEA 2008, Singapore
Fig.2 Gavin Sade, Priscilla Bracks and Matt Dwyer. 'Charmed' ISEA 2008 Conference proceedings
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
