Wired and Weird - Multisensory Touchdesigner Poster

Wired and Weird Physical Computing and Touchdesigner x Multisensory Biodesign

Werkstattkurs im Interfacelab zur interaktiven Postererstellung mit Touchdesigner, dem Mikrokontroller Arduino und reaktiven Sensoren

T H Ǝ C H Ⓐ L∟Ǝ N G Ǝ

3 Sensors

1 Interactive Poster in Touchdesigner

Inspiration and Concept

Grasping from the concept of more-than-human design and Vanesa Lorenzo's Mossphone, an music interface built with moss and sensors, I wanted to develop an interactive moss installation.

The moss was chosen, because it is a living organism, that can be found everywhere in germany and has a long story of habitating planet earth. Following the Idea for my Master Thesis to work on room concepts that foster ecosystemic awereness, the sensory experience through touching the moss, became to important part of my installation.

Mossphone (or Musgófono) is a hybrid interface; a dialog between the organic, toxic particles and electronic system to sound out the Anthropocene. It is a speculative way to listen, sense and intra-act with moss.

Coming from a background in education and opening up spaces for (un)learning together, my aspiration is to research other forms of learning, beside to cognitive - speechbased learning momentum.

Therefor a exploration towards multisensory learning environments and how to apply them in installations. A concept that i just explored last semester was the concept of 'conductive landscapes' and 'becoming geological', inspired through the work with Prof. Myriel Milicevic and Prof. Dr.phil. Monika Halkort from the Art x Science School for Transformation.

I still struggle to understand what it means to rather apply a conductive lense instead of a systemic lense, but I will further investigate on this in the next semester and the course „Reenchanting the field“.

Still the concept of conductive landscapes was a great inspiration for the visual manipulation that i wanted to involve in the poster.

Prototyping

Capacitive and resistive sensor plyon(r).PNG

With the task came 3 major challenges:

understand the main functions of touchdesigner
choose a sensor that supports a nice translation of people touching the moss
understand how it would be possible to work with vivid moss

The first task was a matter of time. Each session we learned a new main operator of touchdesigner and there is a very vivid youtube community around touchdesigner.

The second task was inspired through the musgofono work and yin's explorations with the social robot. A capacitive touch sensor was the choice for my desires, so that the artwork can react on different intensity of touch and at different positions of the moss. Another necessary condition for the sensor was that its water resistive and still allows the moss to grow around the sensor.

The third task was the most explorative one: entering the world of mosses. I only had a general idea about moss before, and wasn't aware of the fact that there are above 20.000 different species of moss worldwide.

Exploring the moss universe and understand if and how it would be possible to work with living organic material was explorative and rewarding.