Lucy Mcrae
HEAVY DUTY LOVE
A cautionary narrative in an uncomfortable, complex debate on the scientific acceleration directing our evolutionary path —from gene-edited babies to CRISPR to AI — Heavy Duty Love is a mental health prop existent as a tactile mechanical structure, asking, “As we head toward a life designed from scratch, will we seek new types of intimacy?”. Realised as a speculative domestic device compensating for a lack of human touch in early life, Heavy Duty Love sandwiches the body between layers of soft, dampening materials normally used in contemporary camping or construction.

Somatic Echo
“Somatic Echo” is an experimental sound art and research project that utilizes bone conducted sound as a method to investigate human audition and create an unusual and mesmerizing aesthetic of the body as a medium of sound. The installation uses a reclining chair and a sound mask to play an 8-channel sound composition through 8 transducers placed on the user’s head: 6 channels in the face and 2 in the back of the head. The transducers transmit sound through the bone structure of the skull directly to the listener’s inner ear, bypassing the outer ears, which normally are the gateway for auditory signals. The listeners experience the soundscape through both their auditory and tactile senses perceiving a sonic image shaped by the sound traveling through the head structure and through vibrations applied to the skin. This set up lets us experience sound through our body and our body through sound.

Weird Fishes
Radiohead

Tobias Stretch made this beautiful and mesmerising stop motion animation for Radiohead’s track ‘Weird Fishes’. Tobias’ natural light stop motion technique conjures a phantasmagorical and intimate world. Grotesque yet endearing puppets traversing the hinterlands in some bizarre pilgrimage. Tactile and beautiful.

Apollo
Victor Pasmore’s ‘Apollo’ Pavilion sits at the heart of the Sunny Blunts estate in Peterlee[…] Four large orange forms intersect the pavilion at right angles to the main orientation and appear to slice through the pavilion. The blocks are drawn from the geometry of the pavilion and a nod to the remote object planes of Victor Pasmore’s work. The inflatable textiles blocks create a juxtaposition between the angular grey concrete of the pavilion and the soft, rounded, colourful forms of the installation. The intervention is deliberately bold with a strong visual aesthetic to temporarily transform the pavilion. The piece is also, on the surface, playful, tactile and accessible – encouraging the audience to look at the pavilion with fresh eyes.

Spectrum
How intensely can you experience colour? Colour as a phenomenon which you don’t just see, but which totally absorbs… Spectrum is a spatial installation that makes colour tactile and tangible.
Fall backwards into a black hole and reawaken in an infinite spectrum. An immersive experience which will give you a whole new perspective on the coloured cycles of our everyday light. Following Blaas and Curve, Spectrum completes a triptych centred on white space, each piece created with spatial designer Cocky Eek in collabaration with Schweigman&. In Blaas you crawl through an inflatable balloon; in Curve you enter an endlessly spiralling tunnel. Spectrum starts by asking: how can we make the colour physically tangible?

Les petits chercheurs de sons
Les Dirty Tangible Interfaces constituent une famille de contrôleurs basés sur l’interaction avec des matériaux tangibles. Elles permettent de contrôler par exemple une tablette de la même manière que l’écran tactile le permet… et elles s’en écartent en fournissant une interaction infiniment nuancée et expressive.

Silverfish Stream
file festival
The sound generated by the friction of the metallic robots against the floor, like that created by the contact between man and machine, is registered, altered and played in real time by the spheres, each with its own tonality, and amplified in the room. What is generated is a stream of multisensory information (visual, auditive, tactile), natural environment for mechanic creatures.

Growth
Wang & Söderström is a Copenhagen based transdisciplinary duo composed of Swedish designer Anny Wang and architect Tim Söderström. The bridging of the physical and digital realms is a major theme in their practice and they are constantly trying to challenge the boundaries between them. Fluctuating between art and design, Wang & Söderström wants to throw out pre-existing conventions regarding the digital and put emphasis on the emotional and tactile side of materials, objects and textures to give the digital a more human-relatable quality and create more meaningful connections. “By 3D scanning elements from nature, like tree trunks, leaves and plants and mixing it with surrealistic materials and behaviors, we wanted to let them continue to grow in a digital environment.”

Pull over
French-israeli-swedish architect-designer bina baitel‘s lighting transcends the interaction between light and material, combining technological innovation with french handcraft. Her newest collection of lighting objects is commissioned and produced by nextlevel galerie in paris.‘Pull-over’: baitel’s previously designed ‘pull-over’ tactile luminaire is now also being produced by nextlevel gallery. The skin of the design is a variable luminous source thanks to its flexible nature – the light bulb, dimmer and lampshade are one.

After Deep Blue

ADB is a modular robot designed for tactile interactions with people. It is composed of a chain of prism-shaped robotic modules. Through the modules’ coordinated behavior, the robot writhes, wriggles and twists in response to the presence of skin and force. The robot is animated only when actively engaged by a person, otherwise it is at rest. Stroking, rubbing or grasping ADB results in it pushing back, retreating or occasionally grasping onto a body part, depending on the combination of stimulus. Participants may experience the object at their leisure. They can play with the device, exploring how it feels, and how it responds to their touch.

Legends Of Exos
FILE FESTIVAL
We are two artists from Lithuania. Our primary areas of interest lie in animation and tactile crafts. Our creative goal is to produce authentic work that is visually and aesthetically challenging, yet peculiarly subtle. We tend to experiment, play and explore amongst conventional subjects.

Compass
Compass is a kind of orientation machine to wear around your waist that gives you directions while you are walking through virtual corridors and rooms. These have been programmed to fit the physical exhibition space or any other venue. The machine creates a feeling of attraction or repulsion that can be compared to be being in a magnetic field. You can explore this environment and discover a tactile architecture. The machine is programmed to make you follow an invisible map, but you can choose between resisting to the machine or giving in and letting yourself be guided.

A student from Danish Design School, Ellinor Ericsson has designed a chair called TubeMe which was exhibited on the Stockholm Furniture Fair 2011. In designer’s words, “The TubeMe chair is about a tactile interaction with a chair. You are able to braid the naked chair with pillow tubes creating your own upholster with the different textiles. While actually sitting in the chair you can interact with it by using the tubes or just throw them around you and fall asleep being embraced.”

ダグエイケン
道格·艾特肯
Return to the Real
‘Return to the Real’ is Aitken’s device to make us think about our devices, the experiential subletting to Instagram, the squeal and squawk of social media. ‘It’s a counterpoint to that world of de-materiality and speed,’ he says, ‘and about seeking something which is unique or being in a place which is physical and tactile or a moment which is unrepeatable.’

Against expectations
Amy Stephens’ work is fundamentally sculptural in both its form and content, taking for its starting point the tactile and expressive qualities of a range of materials. Contrasting the angularity of wood and metal with the soft tactility of fabric and flock, her assemblages occupy a space between the abstract and the associative, and between seduction and control.

林天苗
Endless door
LIAN TIANMIAO lives and works out of Beijing creating predominantly installation pieces. She has made a career transforming silk, threads and textiles into elaborate works of art and also for her experimentation with photography and video. Her art has a textural and tactile nature that plays on the senses.

MATERIALITY
With the introduction of “Materiality,” a stunning continuation of her previous works, but with new vision and just as much revelation, Andreea manages to create another incredible tactile and visual experience. Inspired by jewelry and precious stones, the collection takes a flexible, fluid, and much more playful approach to adornment.

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…

Martela
FILE FESTIVAL
Tactila is an art form whose medium is the sense of touch (tact) which is independent from the all the other ones and has its own intelligence, imagination, memory, perception, and sensation. It is well known that vision and sound have hegemony in arts and in other disciplines. Tactila takes place in time and, therefore, can be recorded and have various forms of notation for subsequent executions. That is why its development became possible only now, thanks to mechatronic and robotic systems which are compatible with machine languages.
The creation of tactile works involves a (tact) composition, which can be made through handmade notation and played on a keyboard or directly on the computer of the tactile machine ( robot ).
Tactile machines can present numerous tactile possibilities through points, vectors, and textures with varying rhythms and intensities, and be run in different extensions and locations of our body.

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The first tactile machine is called “Martela”. It is a tactile robot comprised of 27 engines subdivided into three squares (3 x 3), i.e., each square has 9 engines. Each engine corresponds to a matrix point, so we have 27 tactile units that allow to touch the user’s body with various intensities.

Matieres Sensibles
file festival 

Matières sensibles est une série de sculptures réalisées à partir de feuilles de placage de bois très fines et délicates. Ces feuilles de bois possèdent des zones tactiles sonores distinctes qui suivent les veines naturelles du bois. Nos recherches nous ont permis de développer un processus artistique et technique invisible et délicat. Ce travail minutieux nous donne ainsi la possibilité de composer une partition sonore sensible qui se révèle au contact des différents dessins du bois. Nous avons inventé ce procédé de Bio hacking que nous nommons “marqueterie interactive”.Nos sculptures de bois produisent des sons lorsque que les spectateurs les frôlent. Elles frémissent, ronronnent, crissent… émettent des timbres sonores variés. Nous utilisons ici les sons pour stimuler un comportement gestuel et haptique.Ces sculptures de bois proposent une relation intime et sensorielle entre le bois et le corps du spectateur en révélant une mémoire sonore au contact physique de la matière.Depuis plusieurs années, nous inventons des oeuvres interactives qui mettent en scène les éléments naturels et les corps des spectateurs. Dans cette œuvre, nous utilisons le bois comme une surface interactive sensible. En interprétant cette sensorialité nous rappelons que notre environnement est fait non pas de choses inertes, mais vivantes, réactives. L’énergie électrostatique du corps humain est l’élément déclencheur de cette œuvre. Les zones interactives suivent exactement les veines du bois.
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Contemporary Art Centre in Cordoba
BUILDING FAÇADE WITH AN INTEGRATED LIGHT AND MEDIA INSTALLATION

To transform the façade into a light and media display without fundamentally changing its solid appearance as envisioned by Nieto Sobejano turned out to be the biggest challenge in the project. The façade is accordingly designed to deliver a tactile and solid appearance in the daytime while it turns at night into a unique and dynamic communication wall that reacts very specifically to the architecture. The 100-meter façade consists of 1,319 hexagonal, recessed and pre-fabricated “bowls” on different scales. Each of the bowls serves as a reflector for an integrated artificial light source. The intensity of each lamp can be controlled individually, forming a huge irregular low-resolution grey scale display. The thorough immersion of the “pixel-bowls” – like negative impressions – in the volume of the façade turns the architectural scheme itself into a digital information carrier. During the day, the façade shows a three-dimensional landscape with no sign of being a media facade. Additionally, this tectonically modulated surface topography is characterized by a playful composition of light and shadow that constantly changes with the movement of the sun.

Circulation rouge

L’œuvre de Lionel Estève se situe à la croisée du dessin, de la sculpture et de l ‘installation. L’informel et la fragilité, qui caractérisent ses œuvres, éveillent notre perception d’une réalité infinie en dévoilant un espace palpable, presque tactile. Son travail joue sur l’espace, les couleurs et la perception sensorielle.
Ces œuvres rappellent l’intérêt de l’artiste pour les énergies créatrices et leurs captations.
Artisan, chercheur, Lionel Estève déploie matières, lignes, couleurs dans l’intervalle du perceptible et de l’imperceptible

It´s fire, you can touch it

On the other hand, an example of a work representing a difference in which the viewer is faced with participation in the event, is an installation by Yoko Ishii and Hiroshi Homura It’s fire, you can’t touch it (2007). In this work which appoints the active environment, onto the hands reached out by the participants, miniature light signs are projected—a Japanese tanka poem is running through, glyphs change form, fuse together, move. Here we deal with a poetic spectacle in which the perspective of cognitive interactivity, set off in contact with poetry, is complemented by tactile sensations and poems themselves are as if extracted from the environment by interactive gestures of receivers-readers.

New Tangible Interfaces TTI

Interactive surfaces makes everyday objects multi-functional and fun. Reactive technologies have now enabled normal interfaces with new functions and new possibilities. The role of the surface is changing radically, according to how it’s designed and incorporated with objects. My proposal was to re-define the role of the surface in future lifestyle, exploring how surfaces can be an integrated as part of a product or environment.

TTI, (standing for Tangible Textural Interface) is a new sound system that embeds a tactile surface. TTI has flexibility that enables people to physically touch and feel the response through the controls and physical morph of the surface. TTI delivers new aesthetics through integrated flexible surfaces as interface material unlike adapting conventional materials for interfaces such as plastic or glass. Unlike existing 2D interfaces, TTI has a curved 3D surface opening up new possibilities in making flexible forms and shapes within the interface.

TTI consists of 3 main functions, backwards and forwards, volume control and equaliser, having a physical feedback and control interface within one surface. As you control the functions, the left surface physically responds to the controls. Tactile surface also responds to the beat of the music.

Астрид Крог
light tapestry
“En tant que pionnière dans le domaine d’un nouveau genre de tapisseries infusée de lumière, l’impact du travail d’Astrid Krogh sur les arts, l’architecture et le design est considérable. Alors que jusque là les tapisseries étaient considérées comme de simples ajouts décoratifs à nos intérieurs, Krogh a montré comment la technologie textile pouvait en faire des éléments architecturaux. En intégrant le textile dans l’architecture, Krogh a ouvert la voie à des formes fluides et au design qui favorisent les relations dynamqiues entre le spectateur et l’objet. Par le passé la relation tactile à l’objet textile ne passait que par le sens du toucher, dans le travail de Krogh cette relation est mesurée par l’œil et ressenti de tous nos sens.» Bradley Quinn

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.