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Spirited Box

Interactive Object, 2014

Spirited Box is an interactive box that audience can communicate with by tapping and hearing. Specific patterns of tapping may result in different responses from the box and the audience can choose to further decipher the meaning of these sounds they heard.

Concept

Spirited Box is a part of my research on the functionality of wall and block in human communication. I am particularly interested in the questions why wall exists, both physically and psychologically, and why we are constraint and limited within the space surrounded by those walls. 

With the rapid urbanization and modern civilization, humans are geographically living closer and closer to each other, while it is hard to say that our mental and psychological distances are getting closer. The existence of rooms and apartments sometimes allows us to stand or sleep right beside someone with a single wall in between. This wall prevents us from seeing, touching, hearing, or sensing each other. It makes us remain socially blind and distant, and each of us becomes a single quantifiable social unit within our own shell.

Therefore, the box here was made as a metaphor of the blocking situation of information and emotions, where audience need to interpret and decipher these non-representational languages through different ways of tapping, an effort that leads to an understanding of others.

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Medium & Process

Material: porcelain, stoneware, glaze

Software: pressure sensor, arduino, mini-amplifier & speaker

Video: 

https://vimeo.com/94702290

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Photo Documentation
Other Projects

All Images Copyright © Mengyu Chen | Media Art, Design, Technology

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