Ambient sites: making tangible the subtle, ephemeral and seemingly silent

Ambient Sites are proximal. At our fingertips, under the soles of our feet, along the edge of a cheek, they are characterized by the permeability of boundaries, the sudden awareness of movement, texture, or sound. Commonplace sensory minutiae remain so in part because we perceive them to be diminutive, fleeting or indistinct – mist upon a window, the raised nap of a towel, momentary contact with a drifting feather. What happens when we amplify and make tangible our perception of the subtle, the ephemeral and the seemingly silent? In this studio we will explore varied modes of attuning to and making tangible aspects of the everyday that are intimate in scale and inconspicuous in presence. We will use the arduino, sensors, piezos, motors and everyday materials to compose and prototype sensory and affective experiences that magnify, amplify and re-scale our perceptions of the sonic, the tactile and the intermittently visible. Keywords tangible, prototype, arduino, ambient sites, sensor...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: TEI
• Authors: Diane Willow
• Keywords: ACM Classification, Ambient Sites, Commonplace Sensory Minutiae, Hardware, TEI 2010