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Interactive systems

Objects that respond

I make everyday objects interactive: a desk, a set of mechanisms, a board. Visitors touch them, open them, move them, and they respond. I design and build the whole chain, from sensors to actuators, through electronics, firmware and software.

Tell me your ideaWhere they have been

Physical interfaces

Ordinary objects, heightened perception

My speciality is physical interfaces: ordinary objects made interactive. Sensors and electronics disappear inside the object, which keeps its look but now notices who is using it and responds with a sound, a light, an image, a movement.

The aim is to heighten perception. A screen is something you look at; an object is something you touch, open, move, with your whole body. Visitors are no longer just spectators: they step into the work and change it.

A drawer that tells a story when you open it, a counter that lights up the board when you move it, a mechanism that starts moving again under the visitor's hands: that is how an experience becomes hard to forget and easy to share.

Roots

Theatre first, then technology

I came across interactive systems at the MultiDams of the University of Turin, between music and theatre, and in the Officine Sintetiche workshops in 2008 and 2009. There I studied with Antonio Pizzo, who described how digital media change actor, stage and audience together, and who reads interactive drama as a system of rules: the author does not fix a sequence but the conditions in which the story happens. With Vincenzo Lombardo, who with Pizzo taught the computer to represent a drama. And with Edoardo Fadini, who taught multimedia theatre, video theatre and new theatre, and whose Cabaret Voltaire had brought the avant-garde to Turin, from the Living Theatre to John Cage.

That school shapes the way I work: an interactive installation is a piece of dramaturgy. Before the circuit there is a question: what should happen when someone walks in, touches, speaks?

The field has its masters. Myron Krueger, with VIDEOPLACE in the 1970s, built environments that perceive the body and respond in real time. Brenda Laurel read human–computer interaction as theatre, with the user inside the action. Steve Mann put the person inside the machine's loop, his “humanistic intelligence”, and built instruments played with water, such as the hydraulophone. In Italy Studio Azzurro created “sensitive environments”, where the relationship between people counts as much as the one with the device, and in Genoa Antonio Camurri taught machines to read the expressiveness of gesture. Finally, Lev Manovich described “augmented space”: physical space layered with information, where what changes is not the screen but the place itself.

How I work

One contact, from the idea to the set-up

I design and build the whole technical side myself, with no hand-over between who designs and who builds. For the set-up I work with experienced professionals in exhibition design and installation.

Work

Where they have been

  • lo'bat Interactive System, for Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh and Hesam RahmanianOGR Torino · Toronto Biennial of Art 2019
  • Area StoricaOGR Torino
  • Artissima TelephoneOGR Torino
  • Partisan Airfield MuseumVesime (AT)
  • Cesare Pavese MuseumSanto Stefano Belbo (CN)
  • Carmina Gaelica association
  • Nellabolla association
  • Officine Sintetiche 2008 and 2009

Reading

To go further

The books and studies this work starts from.

Contact

Let's talk

Software to build, a process to automate, an installation to design: write to me, I answer myself.