In the paper presented at TEI in 2007, the authors describe how this sensory mapping creates an expressive and emotional interface allowing couples to communicate through touch, gestures, and body language.

See also her paper: The aesthetics of touch in interaction design! See also Mutsugoto by Tomoko Hayashi, Stefan Agamanolis and Matthew Karau. [Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure]

The DreamLoading project, created by Rafael Beznos, consists in a set of researches, installations and interactive interfaces integrating multiple technological media, artists and collaborators from all around the world, uniting music, video projections, fine arts, architecture, graphite, interactive programming, 2D and 3D animation and digital art in the creation of multimedia experiences, among them interactive samplers of audiovisual for touch-screen or tabletop surfaces (projection over an interactive film on glass or acrylic), interactive art and video exhibition with related animation. For each exhibition it is developed a theme and form related to the place where the work is performed. There have been already several exhibitions of the Dreamloading installations since 2006 - Castelo Branco (PT), Londres (UK), Almeria (ES), Devon (UK), São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre (BR) in the last three editions of the FILE (Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica).

Rafael Beznos is graduated in recording and phonographic technology. He is also musician, producer and DJ, researcher on multimedia and interactive art, programmer, web artist, screenwriter, composer, video maker, VJ and animator, uniting in this diverse path of production the necessary experience to develop the Dreamloading and its derivations, that cause learning, enjoyment, inspiration, information and creativity for those who experience and interact with the work.

The project explores the notion of flow. Rather than fixing the digital in a responsive relationship to the user, where every call defines a reply, Slow Furl finds its temporality outside the immediately animate. The thick skin envelops the space in a deep furl. Like a glacier, this robotic membrane, is formed by its slow action, reacting imperceptibly to its inhabitation.

Slow Furl is playful environment that engages the physical presence of its guests. Users are invited to touch, to sit, or lie within its soft skins. As they do they feel the slow pulse of it’s movements. As a landscape, a cloud formation or an ice wall, it forms and reforms around the body of its user. Slow Furl is the making of a cybernetic environment that holds its own patterns of action and reaction. Conceived as an organism of interacting subsystems, the architecture holds an own motility, an own language of movements that defines its behavioural patterning. The skin clads a dynamic armature creating the possibility for movement. The armature is understood as a distributed computational system where separate parts hold their own potential for actuation. Each arm is controlled by a stand alone micro-controller that activates its mechanical movements. The skin acts as a unifier. Cladding the whole of the surface, the skin joins the movement of the individual arms into one fluid surface.

The skin also acts as a sensory system. Active patches are embroidered into the skin. These patches act on touch. As the skin moves, it activates the micro-controller. The simple shift between self activation (through the movement cycles of the armature) and interaction (through touch and movement of the users) allows the organism to engage an inherent indeterminacy. The architecture is behavioural rather than interactive, motile rather than animate.

Slow Furl has received funding from the Arts Council England, Lighthouse (Brighton) and RIBA (Sussex Branch). INTERArChTIVE is a consortium of Lighthouse (Brighton), Architecture Centre Network, interactivearchitecture.org and RIBA (Sussex branch). [via Interactive Architecture dot org]

The conceit of the project is to create a kind of “durable affinity” amongst the messaging participants. By coupling the message’s slow unfolding to a tangible object that the recipient must hold and carry around, the communication has a kind of interaction ritual that might be more intimate than punching little plastic squares while staring at a screen. Turning time, touch into a condition of affinity and commitment is the interaction ritual we are exploring.