Yesterday evening, Hiroshi Ishii, director of MITs Tangible Media Group gave a sweet little presentation on the research he’s been doing over the years. Since I finally have a narrow project, I was able to glean specific insights from his talk that relate to that nebulous direction I’m heading.
Making a definitive divide between “Tactual” and “Tangible”, Ishii is a proponent of the object in the traditional sense. His piece, “bottlogues” from 2000, is a great example of the tangible object accessing, as he tends to do, an emotional response. The bottles contain music and sounds in an interactive way. I like to think of it as the tech version of an old piece I did, “Contained Cacophony”
What I also love about Ishii’s piece is it’s connection to my favorite book, The Phantom Tollbooth. One character is Dr. Dischord who invents new sounds and bottles them up for sale. I had every intention of linking to a youtube clip of that section of the video.. but alas, the WB had it taken down months ago.
Back at the Ranch
Ishii has done a wonderful thing here. He has linked a sound to an object that does not produce it. It functions much like an instrument when it plays individual noises, but his one example of the perfume bottle for his mother was slightly different. Upon opening, it would let loose the sounds of birds singing in the springtime. The lift of the cap, the function of Opening, accessed not only a sound, but a place, time, and memory.
How else can objects be portals to another world?
