Drawn Together, Held Apart

Caitlin is an artist that is interested in intentional social connection in public spaces. She creates experiences that allow participants to quietly communicate and listen to one another. In the live component of her installation, Caitlin hosts an conversation entitled ‘talking and listening about talking and listening’. ‘Drawn Together, Held Apart’ (2017), a custom made table with inbuilt surface transducer speaker, motion sensor activated LED lighting, proximity speakers and audio. Visitors rest their ears on the glass and listen.

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.

Brume
In the collaborative work Brume fog emerges from and self-organizes on the surface on a sculptural element, congealing with light into an elusive stratum. The installation utilizes a series of ultrasonic transducers that generate thick clouds of dense, yet extremely lightweight water vapor. Fog is produced in an inner chamber contained within an enclosure that is outfitted with a porous surface. A small radial blower inside the apparatus gently pumps air into the inner chamber lifting the fog through the membrane, whereby it “settles” on the surface. Viewed from a distance, the fog appears as a visualized mass of air circumscribing the perimeter of the enclosure.

transdock
Ken Nakagaki, Yingda (Roger) Liu, Chloe Nelson-Arzuaga, and Hiroshi Ishii
TRANS-DOCK is a docking system for pin-based shape displays that expand their interaction capabilities for both the output and input. By simply interchanging the transducer modules, composed of passive mechanical structures, to be docked on a shape display, users can selectively switch between different configurations including display sizes, resolutions, and even motion modalities such as rotation, bending, and inflation.
In our paper accepted to TEI 2020, we introduce a design space consisting of several mechanical elements and enabled interaction capabilities. Our proof-of-concept prototype explores the development of the docking system based on our previously developed 10 x 5 shape display, inFORCE. A number of transducer examples are shown to demonstrate the range of interactivity and application space achieved with the approach of TRANS-DOCK.

Black Box
‘Black Box’ presents a black wooden volume that is suspended in the exhibition space. The base of the object shows a hollow in the shape of a skull. When the visitor enters this cavity with his head, the status of the object switches into that of an interface. This device contains eight transducers which transfer spatialized audio onto the skull when in contact. The audio is invasive: the acoustic environment is rearranged across the limited space of one’s head in such a way that after a while nothing lasts but two milliseconds of the original realtime sample. What is left is a click that will hop across the inner side of your skull.