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.

Sun and Moon Room
Sun and Moon Room in the Art Museum of Nature and Human Non-Homogeneity, located in Bungotakada City, Oita, houses one of the interactive art installations designed to extend one’s physicality in contact with the nature. The concept of this work is a room where visitors can play with sunlight. As visitors walk through the room, small apertures on the ceiling automatically open and close, following their movements. The aperture system is designed to envelop the visitors’ bodies in light and to change the shape of the light cast at their feet, mimicking the waxing and waning of the moon. Visitors’ movements are detected by sensors, which trigger to open only the apertures located in the direction of the sun. The room is controlled to create an interior condition that represents the weather of the moment using a program for analyzing live data released by the Japan Meteorological Agency.

50Myconnect

Myconnect “offers the experience of a symbiosis of connection between humans, nature and technology. The spectator becomes an actor by lying in a capsule, equipped with a helmet and body sensors measuring the variations in his rhythm This data is modulated and transmitted to a closed universe of mycelium culture (white mushroom) to produce alterations using electrical resistance. These variations in turn generate signals, sent back to the person in the form of vibration, sound and light. Each cycle can be different depending on whether the experience is stimulating or calming. This type of perceptual exchange enabled by technology reveals how much the human being is an integral part of the complex network that links him to his environment.

StickMan
StickMan is a minimal but full-body exoskeleton that algorithmically actuates the artist with 6 degrees-of-freedom. It is a gesture generating system capable of 64 possible combinations. Sensors on StickMan generate sounds that augment the pneumatic noise and register the limb movements. A ring of 6 speakers directs and circulates the sounds.

asphyxia
The performance is centered in an eloquent choreography that stresses the desire to be expressive without bounds. Motion data was captured using inexpensive sensors and that data paved the way through an extensive number of steps. Once all the scanned point cloud data were combined, they were used as the base for the creative development on the piece. A series of iterative studies on styles followed and several techniques and dynamic simulations were then applied using a number 3D tools for various results.

The Heart Chamber Orchestra
File Festival – Hipersonica 

In the TERMINALBEACH Heart Chamber Orchestra (made up of artists Erich Berger and Peter Vatava), twelve musicians played pieces from the heartbeat, recorded by an electrocardiogram from data sent by sensors placed on their bodies. As the live score created in real time from the physical and emotional states of the musicians, their beats further influenced the resulting musical composition. In this way, the biological feedback loop becomes a self-generating, organic and evolving system, which creates a musical score and a show that adopts the form of open or network art, in which chance and interdependence, thus how emotional changes and computational reasoning create a biological and psychological dynamic at the same time.

The willful marionette
the willful marionette (2014) was created by artists Lilla LoCurto and Bill Outcault during a residency with the University of North Carolina Charlotte, working with the College of Computing and Informatics as well as the College of Art and Architecture. The marionette is 3d printed from the scanned image of a human figure and responds engagingly in real time to spontaneous human gestures by reading a viewer’s movements and expressions. Its strings are manipulated by motors and software and there are two depth sensors that read and analyze the behaviors and gestures of participants. The puppet’s subsequent actions are designed to elicit further responses, creating an exchange focusing on the frailty and insecurities of the human participant and raising issues of contemporary relevance. The intention of the project was not to create so much a perfectly functioning robot but rather to imbue an obviously mechanically actuated marionette with the ability to solicit a physical and emotional dialog with a viewer.

PIVOT POINT – ICHIHARA
‘Pivot Point – Ichihara’ is an interactive site-specific installation. Standing on a controller pod you navigate over and through a 3D terrain where gravity seems to have disappeared, you gradually become tele-present in a parallel projected space by exploring a mediated version of the venue, it’s direct surroundings and the Ichihara region. A cinematic journey to a fascinating point cloud realm, precise in details but simultaneously abstract and dreamlike.The kidney shaped interface is covered with capacitive sensors and mounted on a pole, touching this interface right, left, up or down aims the virtual camera accordingly. When you release the navigation pole the virtual camera automatically starts spiralling back to the initial starting point your journey and temporary centre of the universe, the Asohbara Art House.

Can’t Help Myself
Constructed of a Kuka industrial robot arm, ‘Can’t Help Myself’ is programmed to do one thing: contain a viscous, deep-red liquid within a fixed area. When the blood-like substance pools too much, this activates the robot’s sensors causing the arm to swivel, flex, and shovel the liquid back to the center leaving splashes and smudges in its wake.

Electronic Traces
E-TRACES, memories of dance
The shoes are based on the clone of Lilypad Arduino technology, which is designed for sewing into wearables. It appears that 3 force sensitive resistors are used as analog pressure sensors, measuring the force applied on the ground by the dancer’s feet.

24 Drohnen
24 Drohnen ist eine Videodemonstration der unglaublichen Drohnen von Rhizomatiks und ihrer Fähigkeit, sich auf noch nie dagewesene Weise im 3D-Raum zu bewegen. Mit komplizierten Sensorsystemen sowohl an den Drohnen als auch im Raum überprüfen die Drohnen ständig ihre Umgebung und kartieren sie, um sich zu bewegen, ohne miteinander zu kollidieren, oder mit einem Sprecher, der mitten im Drohnenschwarm steht und sie mit Gesten und Bewegungen steuert . Die Bewegung der Drohnen ist nicht nur kontrolliert und sicherer als je zuvor, das Bewusstsein der Drohnen für ihre Umgebung lässt sie bewusst erscheinen und gibt ihnen ein Gefühl der Persönlichkeit.

Who Wants To Be A Self Driving Car?

The moovel lab collaborated with MESO Digital Interiors to prototype this immersive experience. The idea was to make a machine that replaces the human senses with the sensors that a self-driving car might use. Our unconventional driving machine is essentially a steel-frame buggy with in-wheel, electric motors, complete with hydraulic breaking. Drivers lay head first on the vehicle; the positioning used to enhance the feeling of immersion (and vulnerability) created during the experience. A physical steering wheel controls the turning of the vehicle.The VR experience is created using data collected by the sensors outfitted on the driving machine.

Light Cloud
The Light Cloud at the Merck Innovation Center detects visitors’ movements in the room and translates them into many different moods. The generative sculpture stimulates and facilitates intense encounters between people and technology. The room-filling installation consists of four curved strands that are concentrically superimposed and slightly shifted in relation to each other. OLED elements that are attached to the strands and controlled by sensors react to the visitors’ movements and to sound compositions. In combination, this generates a complex mosaic in which sound and light interact playfully and the viewers leave traces.

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.

Telemetron
Nicole L’Huillier and Sands Fish decided to explore how design and creativity might evolve as we begin to do more than merely survive in space. The Telemetron is a unique musical instrument that takes advantage of the poetics of zero gravity, and opens a new field of musical creativity. The project attempts to expand expression beyond the limits of Earth-based instruments and performers. Leveraging sensors, data transmission and capture (for performance after flight), as well as their experience as composers and performers, Sands and Nicole explore a new body language for music.

parallel image
This work consists of 2500 magnetic wire cables that connect an emitter (one square meter made of epoxy resin) that consists of a 50 × 50 grid with photo sensors that have their counterparts in the receiver with a grid of bulbs. Thus the sensors detect the light and transmit in parallel each pixel (“image element”) with its corresponding brightness effect to the light bulb in the receiver. Unlike conventional electronic image transmission procedures, “A Parallel Image” uses a technologically transparent procedure, transmitting to the viewer a correspondence between the real world and its transmission.

克劳斯奥伯迈尔
the concept of … (here and now)

In front of a giant screen, two dancers interact with a cohort of cameras… Their movements are captured by infra-red sensors and projected onto the screen, whereby their bodies become the canvas on which new images take shape. The result is a shifting kaleidoscope of strange, living, quasi-mathematical visual worlds which sometimes seem to be emanating or even escaping from the dancers’ bodies. “Who decides which movement to make: the man or the machine?” Blurring the line between the real and the virtual, Klaus Obermaier loves to subsume his performers’ bodies and physicality in a disconcerting digital universe. With his latest creation, the choreographer/artist has taken a bold new step. He has constructed a system of projectors and infra-red sensor-cameras, trained upon the movements of two dancers. The performers thus find themselves thrown headlong into a living, moving graphical universe: their movements are projected onto the screen, but at the same time their bodies are illuminated by more projected images. This is a true artistic performance, pushing well beyond the frontiers of a standard dance recital, or even a contemporary dance show. A corporeal, temporal performance. A choreography which makes subtle use of its raw materials, deftly combining lights, video, perspectives and the real-time power of bodily movement.

Abysmal
Abysmal means bottomless; resembling an abyss in depth; unfathomable. Perception is a procedure of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. Perception presumes sensing. In people, perception is aided by sensory organs. In the area of AI, perception mechanism puts the data acquired by the sensors together in a meaningful manner. Machine perception is the capability of a computer system to interpret data in a manner that is similar to the way humans use their senses to relate to the world around them. Inspired by the brain, deep neural networks (DNN) are thought to learn abstract representations through their hierarchical architecture. The work mostly shows the ‘hidden’ transformations happening in a network: summing and multiplying things, adding some non-linearities, creating common basic structures, patterns inside data. It creates highly non-linear functions that map ‘un-knowledge’ to ‘knowledge’.

Swamp Radio
Swamp Radio gets beyond our anthropocenic reality, and maintains connections between the humans and other species. By artistic interventions and transmitting interfaces, the Swamp Radio is turned into a social media megaphone for invisible and inaudible actors of nature. The artists are installing microbial fuel cells, environmental monitoring sensors and transmitting devices to transform the swamps into dynamic power plants and the 21st century multi-voiced broadcast media.

ELECTRIC SKIN

The Electric Skin explores the possibility of creating a wearable that extends the functionality of the skin to sense electromagnetic fields (mostly within the radio spectrum) and translate that information into touch sensation. The wearable consists of two main functional parts: 1) A matrix of omnidirectional antennas that act as sensors and probes and 2) corresponding electrodes that stimulate the skin of the wearer. Through this artificial “skin” or “exoskeleton”, the wearable changes our experience, perception, and understanding of space and movement, and in doing so, our interactions. The project speculates on the possible co-evolution of man and technology and draws attention to the role of environmental influence on our own bodily development and behavior.

Mai Hi Ten Yu
Yamaha artificial intelligence (AI) technology enabled the world-renowned dancer Kaiji Moriyama to control a piano by his movements. The AI adopted in the system can identify a dancer’s movement in real time by analyzing signals from four types of sensors attached to a dancer’s body. This system has an original database that links melody and movements, and, with this database, the AI on the system creates suitable melody data (MIDI) from the dancer’s movements instantly. The system then sends the MIDI data to a Yamaha Disklavier™ player piano, and it is translated into music.

真鍋 大 度

One of the new technology projects from the programmer and artist Daito Manabe based in Tokyo, Japan, centres on experimental music performances and connects a person’s face to electric sensors. This innovative system lets you ‘play’ your face like a musical instrument with the help of facial movements that trigger sounds. Electrical stimulation makes a face twitch involuntary, each twitch matches the beat of the music.

Prehysterical Machine

The Prehysterical Machine has a spherical body and eight arms made of aluminum tubing. It has a sensing system, a motor system and a control system that functions as an autonomous nervous system (entirely reactive). The machine is suspended from the ceiling and its arms are actuated by pneumatic valves and cylinders. Pyroelectric sensors allow the robot to detect the presence of viewers in the nearby environment. It reacts to the viewers according to the amount of stimuli it receives. The perceived emergent behaviors of this machine engender a multiplicity of interpretations based on single dynamic pattern of events.The aim of this project is to induce empathy of the viewer towards a “character” which is nothing more than an articulated metal structure. The strength of the simulacra is emphasized by perverting the perception of the creature, which is neither animal nor human, carried through the inevitable instinct of anthropomorphism and projection of our internal sensations, a reflex triggered by any phenomenon that challenges our senses.
FILE FESTIVAL

Contours
London-based creative laboratory Bare Conductive was invited to team up with designers Fabio Antinori and Alicja Pytlewska in order to develop a large-scale metaphor for the idea of breathing life into a collection of responsive textile skins. ‘Contours’ is at the core of the interactive tapestry installation; a series capacitive sensors are applied to the suspended fabric substrates using conductive paint. These sensors react to the presence of a person within the vicinity and track their movements, outputting a constantly modulated ambient soundscape reminiscent of medical research environments. The abstract geometric ornamentation connects the tapestries’ individual sensors to form giant panels, serving as an acoustic feedback loop that alludes to the relationship between science and the body.

Silent Barrage

Silent Barrage has a “biological brain” that telematically connects with its “body” in a way that is familiar to humans: the brain processes sense data that it receives, and then brain and body formulate expressions through movement and mark making. But this familiarity is hidden within a sophisticated conceptual and scientific framework that is gradually decoded by the viewer. The brain consists of a neural network of embryonic rat neurons, growing in a Petri dish in a lab in Atlanta, Georgia, which exhibits the uncontrolled activity of nerve tissue that is typical of cultured nerve cells. This neural network is connected to neural interfacing electrodes that write to and read from the neurons. The thirty-six robotic pole-shaped objects of the body, meanwhile, live in whatever exhibition space is their temporary home. They have sensors that detect the presence of viewers who come in. It is from this environment that data is transmitted over the Internet, to be read by the electrodes and thus to stimulate, train or calm parts of the brain, depending on which area of the neuronal net has been addressed.

チームラボ
floating flower garden
“Much as Random International’s “Rain Room” allowed visitors to walk through the rain without getting wet, “Floating Flower Garden” is designed so that viewers can walk through a hanging garden without getting … flowered. Sensors that detect an approaching viewer cause flowers in that viewer’s vicinity to rise.” Kriston Capps

FILE SAO PAULO 2017
THE FLOOOR
“The Flooor” is a collaborative music instrument and a social meeting place. 36 sensors under a carpet, connected to a music computer mounted under the floor and loudspeakers mounted in the ceiling.
The patterns printed on the carpet invite people to explore different combinations. 6 groups with different instruments, 6 zones in each group. By standing or dancing on different combinations of the 6 zones, 64 different loops can be triggered.

Living pod
file festival
Light, shape variations and mimicry meet in Living Pod. In front of the false twin pieces, the user can slowly set garment A in motion using a light source. Garment B then imitates piece A in an exaggerated and unbalanced fashion, changing structure through miniature electric motors activated by light sensors that are sown through the garment. Using flat-pattern cutting techniques, Ying Gao was able to give the process fluidity and flexibility. In addition to the mechanical movements of the garments, Living Pods underlines two fundamental aspects of today’s fashion system: confrontation and imitation. The garment plays a mediating role between man and his environment. By using light, Living Pod is similar to project Walking City, which uses air to make the pieces look like they are breathing.

Embrace in Progress
Embrace in Progress explores conflicted feelings of shared intimacy. It is inspired by personal and cultural experiences where human contact is not commonly practiced in social interaction. The daunting and unfamiliar proximity of being captured in someone’s arms distorts one’s sense of time. The project was inspired by slit-scan photography and uses depth sensors to capture a series of intimate embraces. These 3D printed pieces recreate the act of embracing and are represented in a static form by the flow of movement twisted because of time.

Gravicells
Gravicells puts the senses on edge. This installation produces a visualization and sonification of the force of gravity acting upon the visitor. Interconnected sensors continuously measure the visitor’s weight, movements and speed. The resulting data are converted into physical audio-visual experience by various media systems.

On Shame
FILE BELO HORIZONTE 2018-DISRUPTIVA
foto: Luiza Ananias
On Shame is part of the series Psychosomatics which was initiated in 2010. In these works Franco makes it possible to tangibly experience such emotions as joy, fear, confusion, happiness or shame by means of digital technologies. Cameras and motion and tactile sensors serve as tools to facilitate the dialogue between humans and machines. more…

Bubbles
Bubbles is an adaptable spatial pneumatic installation at an urban scale. The installation consists of large pneumatic volumes that inflate and deflate in reaction to the visitors coming to the site. If unoccupied the volume of the site is slowly filled by the spatially distributed sacks creating a translucent bubble translucent infill. As the occupants enter and move through the installation, they bump the bubbles ranging from 6′ to 8′ in diameter that fill the lower layer of the space. More activity opens up the space more making it navigable. Sensors in the bubbles cause a fan in the manifold to transfer air to the bubble.

Jacobson’s Fabulous Olfactometer
Created by Susanna Hertrich, Jacobson’s Fabulous Olfactometer (JFO) is a sensorial prosthesis that mimics mammalian ‘flehmen’ when air pollution levels are high. The prosthetic is designed around a new human sense modeled after a mammalian sense organ called the vomeronasal or “Jacobson’s” organ. This olfactory sense organ enables certain animals to sense odourless chemicals. When a mammal senses chemicals, it lifts its upper lip to expose this organ. This behaviour is called ‘flehmen’ (wikipedia).Two air chemical sensors located at the top part of the prosthetic register small particles (smoke) and CO2 levels. This data is fed into an Arduino board. When air pollution levels are registered as ‘high’, two stepper motors on either side of the head set exaggerated bone gears in motion and the wearer’s lip is slowly pulled upwards. Thus, JFO enables its wearer to ‘sense’ airborne chemicals and modifies his/her face similar to mammalian flehmen.Sensing and data processing is achieved using an Arduino with a Smoke detector (fine particles) & a Co2 sensor. The device also includes Adafruit stepper motor shield, two stepper motors and a custom designed gears carved from camel bone.

shade
Eine reaktionsschnelle Haut an den Fenstern eines Gebäudes, die Tageslicht in eine sich bewegende Schattenprojektion filtert und die sich ständig ändernde natürliche Zeitachse des Außenbereichs in den statischen und immerwährenden Innenraum überträgt. Schatten ist ein neues Material, das als Glasfensteroberfläche verwendet wird . Durch variables Blockieren oder Durchlassen von Licht wird Sonnenlicht zu einem räumlichen, grafisch projizierten bewegten Bild von Schatten. Auf der Oberfläche befindet sich ein Gitter aus dreieckigen Zellen, die jeweils einzeln ihre Opazität ändern und somit Licht blockieren oder durchlassen können. Die grafischen Schatten, die auf den Boden, die Wände und die Decke des Raums projiziert werden – je nach Tageszeit von scharf und grafisch bis hin zu Umgebung und Raum -, zeigen die geometrischen Windmuster, die das Gebäude auf der anderen Seite des Glases passieren. Dies wird durch die Messungen eines Außensensors choreografiert. Da sich sowohl der Sonnenwinkel als auch die Windmuster im Laufe des Tages und des Jahres ständig ändern, wird der fortwährende Charakter des künstlichen Raums wieder mit einer sich entwickelnden, ungeplanten natürlichen Zeitachse verbunden.

Protest

“Protest” is from the project, “Misbehaving: Media Machines Act Out”(2002-2007), a series of mechanical girls’ legs, each with their own prescribed and programmed behavior. In each tableau, an electronically controlled, mechanical being protests with a voice of erratic physical gestures and projected video imagery. As a combination of robotics and performance, they represent girls who disobey or resist expectations. Unlike machines designed for perfect job performance, these machines will declare their fallibility, impatience, approval, and disapproval through small gestural acts. In these tableaus of protest and transformation, the machine is spirited, emotional, thoughtful, and irregular. “Protest” consists of aluminum, mechanized pairs of 6 year-old girl’s legs fitted with shoes and standing on a table top. An electronic circuit and proximity sensors make her responsive to the presence of viewers for whom she stomps loudly and erratically

Symphony in D Minor

‘Symphony in D Minor’ is an interactive sound and video installation on an epic scale. A thunderstorm contained within a series of large hand cast resin sculptures, each individual form is a unique instrument hanging from the ceiling. Suspended just within reach and activated by touch, the viewer sets the symphony in motion by pushing the forms through the air to trigger the various sound elements of the storm. Sensors relay individual recordings of thunder, lightning, wind and rain with alternating intensities to a full-scale sound system. Acting as both conductor and musician, the viewer creates an evolving composition out of atmospheric sounds, forging an environment that envelops the audience. Housed within each piece are 2 video projectors employing mapping software to evenly fill the surface of the forms. Like giant illuminated pendulums each sculpture radiates video projections that in their dormant state display abstractions of water droplets and slow moving clouds. As the sensors detect movement different ranges initiate more visual elements of the storm. Once activated, the form then shifts to a swirling torrent of clouds.

振り子の合唱団
CYCLOID-E

This piece, which comprises a series of tubular pieces arranged horizontally and activated by a motor, generates a particular sound through its movement, which is unexpectedly harmonic. The artists have taken their interest in the mechanisms that generate wave motions as a starting point to create this sculpture: five metal tubes joined together feature sound sources and sensors that allow them to emit different sounds based on their rotations.
The sculpture runs through a series of rhythmic movements, like a dance, creating, in the words of the artists themselves, “a unique kinetic and polyphonic work, in the likeness of the “Cosmic Ballet” to which the physicist Johannes Kepler refers to in his “Music of the Spheres” in 1619.” This work is part of the reflection on the possible interactions between sound and movement developed by the artists since 1999, using electronic devices and inspired by the aesthetics of industrial machinery.

Requiem

The robot Requiem is an interactive pneumatic exoskeleton made of aluminium sheets, stainless steel and nineteen pneumatic pistons enabling movement of the knees, thighs, groin, hip, shoulders, elbows, jaw and hands. The robot is suspended by the head from an iron support, hanging a short distance from the floor. As an installation Requiem has eight sensors located around the exhibition space and they can be activated by the spectators.

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.