Oracle Collection
The performance centered around ORACLE, a digital palm reading given by model and iconic muse Axelle Doué. The surrounding luminous dresses embodying the four elements— air, earth, water, and fire—come alive during the reading, with mirrors reflecting them into infinity. The pieces are crafted from diverse materials, both natural and synthetic. Well beyond typical textiles, Clara Daguin implements optical fibers, pleating, embroidered circuits, addressable LEDs, sculpted resin, home-grown alum stone crystals, Swarovski Elements, silk organza, microcontrollers and radio frequency modules.

CAPACITIVE BODY
file festival

The installation “capacitive body” is a modular light system that reacts to the sound of its environment. Each custom-built module consists of an electro-luminescent light wire linked to a piezoelectric sensor and a microcontroller. Through its modular setup it can easily be adapted to various urban spaces. The sensors are used to measure vibrations of architectural solids in a range of low frequencies. These oscillations are triggered by surrounding ambient noise, for example traffic noise. The data sensor controls the light wires, which are tensed to a spatial net structure. According to the values of the measurement, light flashes are generated. With increasing vibrations the time between flashes becomes shorter and shorter. The stability of this nervous system gets to an end where it collapses and restarts again. A dynamic light space is thereby created, which creates a visual feedback of the aural activity around the installation.

Please Smile
File Festival
“Please smile” is an exhibit involving five robotic skeleton arms that change their gestures depending on a viewer’s facial expressions. It consists of a microcontroller, a camera, a computer, five external power supplies, and five plastic skeleton arms, each of them with four motors. It incorporates elements from mechanical engineering, computer vision perception, to serve artistic expression with a robot.

Dravb
dravb consists of an 8×8 LED matrix and two proximity sensors. It uses two ESP8266 microcontrollers as ADCs to map hand movement to the matrix, but could also be used for musical purposes. I wanted it to have the look and feel of an old analog computer, with a clunky interface and dubious visual feedback.

Particle Waves
“Particle Waves” is a kinetic sound sculpture comprising of a 4×3 grid of 12 individual kinetic bowls. Within each bowl contains tiny metal beads of various sizes, creating “noises“ as the bowl rotates in various angles. The noise from a single bowl forms collectively to become a soundscape, reminding us of waves and oceans. The bowls are arranged in a 4×3 grid and controlled as a whole by a microcontroller running a wave algorithm. This creates a continuous wave-like kinetic motion over the grid, at the same time creating a spatialized soundscape. This installation is a continuous attempt of exploring the correlation between sound and nature.

Caress of the Gaze
For Caress of the Gaze, Farahi worked with AutoDesk, PIER9 (where she is currently an Artist in Residence) and MADWORKSHOP to create a kind chest-covering cape covered with a beautiful layer of feather-like quills. While they appear soft to the touch, the quills can actually detect the gaze of another (a man, as shown in the video below) and expand and contract as his eyes move around the body. A microcontroller connected to the cape’s camera can also detect the age and gender of the onlooker, perhaps helping the wearer to discern their motives.

Vocal Trio
FILE FESTIVAL
“Vocal Trio,” which consists of three musical instruments, transforms the voice of a singer or a speaker received through a mike into a sound of each musical instrument while maintaining the same rhythm and musical scale. A pipe horn, which looks like a long trumpet or pipe, makes a deep and low-tone horn sound. A water bell, which looks like a water drop, makes a clear bell-sound, and a leaf flute, which looks like a leaf, makes a reed pipe sound. The spectator’s voice is transformed into the sound of a musical instrument by means of a microcontroller chip. The microcontroller chip of each musical instrument makes a sampling of his or her voice’s frequency. A sampling of the voice made through frequency data is sent to midi chips, which transform it into the sound of a particular musical instrument and the sound is released through the speakers.

feel Me tactile interactive bed
File Festival
“feelMe” is a work that for the first time remotely transmits the tactile sensation. Our work provokes the exploration of the sense of touch while promoting the interaction between two people mediated by a machine. The work is constituted of two surfaces, or “beds”: the first one (tactile transmission unit), in which one of the participants, layed down, imprints marks to its surface by pressing it with the weight and movement of the different parts of his/her body; these impressions will be captured and transmitted to the other participant, who lies in the second “bed” (tactile reception unit) and receives them simultaneously in the same positions and in proportional intensities, however, in negative, that is, when the surface in the first bed sinks, it rises in the second one, promoting a touch. The first body touches the second one, and the “beds” may be a few meters or thousands of kilometers apart from each other. Between the bodies, dozens of occult sensors, microcontrollers, engines (lineal actors), computers and a program that orchestrates that tactile communication. We allow the participant to experiment the possibilities of encounter between bodies through the digital world, with a different approach from the one provided by virtual reality. We want to explore the tactile perception separately in its “corporal way”, and only in future works to propose the expansion/extension of multimedia perception with the inclusion of tactile perception.