Please Touch The Art
Interactive art, particularly pieces that are focused on a multi-sensory experience, is incredibly engaging and effective to audiences of all ages.
Please Touch The Art is an art installation designed and built by me for my senior project in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Yale University. The three piece series is intended to encourage the viewer to rethink the ways in which we are traditionally expected to experience art. It is a natural human instinct to want to learn through touch, and I often find myself with the urge to feel the paintings and sculptures in museums. So much information can be passed through tactile exploration. We often only allow children to act upon this urge to reach out and grab something, but there is value in revisiting it even as adults. These three paintings were meant to require you to put your hands on them–once you do, the art transforms into something new and exciting. In order to fully experience all three, you have to give in to your desire to explore them through touch.
The idea for this series came from FURdecahedron, a piece I originally created for a class entitled Creative Embedded Systems. Like the middle painting, it was a furry object that made sound as it was touched, stroked, and played with. While the concept seemed simple, the object was very effective in capturing people’s attention. There is something about the direct mapping of a human driven input to a computer generated output that draws us in. It was so fun to watch people give in to their instinct to play with it and figure it out. To me it seemed to capture a childlike joy of being fascinated with something you can’t quite wrap your head around. I tried to recreate that experience with the three pieces in this show–I wanted them to be irresistible enough that people just had to go touch them, despite the heavy gilded frames that usually signal us to keep our distance. I was very excited to be able to exhibit these pieces in the Trumbull Art Gallery on December 10th, and invite my peers to come and try them out. It was an incredible experience to watch my friends be excited and inspired by my work.
Each piece was designed to have a unique interaction style. The first one I created was Feeling Sound, which is the middle one covered with fur. Hidden beneath the fur are four custom laser print buttons, and three photoresistors with attached resistors. These are connected by wire to the Arduino ESP32 on the back, which is powered by a portable charger. This microcontroller is sending its data over wifi to a computer, which interprets the signals through a python script. Like my previous project, these values are translated into frequencies using Super Collider. Then, the sound is played through a bluetooth speaker embedded in the piece. The sounds only play when one of the four buttons is pressed, requiring interaction from the viewer. It creates an engaging experience in which the user must stand in front of the painting and feel around to discover how to generate the sounds that come from within it.
The next piece I created was Touching Light. It makes use of conductive paint and capacitive touch sensing to control the LED strip hidden behind the frame. Each one of the black blobs on the front of the painting is painted with the conductive paint. They are connected to the back of the frame using nails, which are then connected by wire to the GPIO pins of the Arduino Uno, and to the 5V pin through a resistor. This sends a voltage over the paint, so that when it is touched with a bare finger, the capacitance on the corresponding pin is greater, and the touch can be registered. This data was then transmitted to the 4 meters of directly addressable LEDs in the NeoPixel Digital RGB LED Strip connected behind the frame. I designed it so that when a part of the painting is touched, the LEDs nearest to the touch light up a specific color. This works for a single touch or multiple. If a hand is placed in the middle of the painting, and all of the black paint is being touched, a moving rainbow effect is triggered for ten seconds.
The final piece in this series is Handling Motion. It consists of two feather boas, each connected to four servos and hidden behind the empty frame. They are controlled by two ultrasonic distance sensors, which are concealed on the insides of the frame, so that they are only triggered when someone reaches in and touches the wall. Each one of the sensors is simultaneously mapped to two of the servos, so that the closer an object is to the sensor, the closer the servos are to 180 degrees. As an object slowly backs away, the servos move in increments of 10 back to their original position of 0. This creates an exciting effect of when a hand is placed in the middle of the frame, the boas start to pop in and out based on the readings of the sensors.
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This project meant so much to me, and I was very grateful for the opportunity to combine my interest in electronics, interactive systems, and art. I was able to create these three pieces that almost entirely conceal the systems that make them work, which allowed them to be more surprising and engaging and viewers tried to figure them out. I hope to continue making work like this in the future, creating new interactive art that excites and intrigues people.