Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
-Arthur C Clarke

The objective of this project is to use an interactive installation comprised visuals and re-interpreted everyday objects to visualize the technological systems that underlie the devices that we use.

Concept:

Most of the time, we live our lives within these invisible systems, blissfully unaware of the artificial life, the intensely designed infrastructures that support them.
-Bruce Mau

This installation will consist of a seemingly chaotic but highly staged set of objects and a constructed set of monitors displaying different visuals. Some of these objects when manipulated will cause a change in events that appear on the set of monitors. The visuals created will consist of cause- and- effect themed content. The entire structure's operation will exist in a state of constant change, with each small change made by the audience generating new content in the installation.

Circuit boards, televisions, iPods and radios are all made from objects. What separates their innards from the objects we encounter in everyday life is simply a matter of scale and structure. This installation intends to represent the idea that any system, natural or technological, is composed of objects and operated by the manipulation of those objects. Stuff is all stuff. This installation aims to represent the idea that technology is mostly hidden from view in our everyday lives.

Technological items designed for a mass audience are increasingly designed in a way that disguises their inner workings. While in the past a cassette tape may have been rewound by a little finger stuck into its tape dial, now iPods must be sent away to be fixed. Users are not invited to fiddle with the insides of their digital cameras or personal music players. Their outer casing gives no indication of the operations inside. The design of items such as the iPod concentrate on maximum usability by a mass audience. Any customizing done is limited to the strict tenets of iPod objects.

This constrained use of the iPod means many of its users do not understand how the object actually works. The iPod is there, it works or does not and that is that.

This installation intends to tackle the question- if design of technology continues to develop in this way, will technology become a second nature? If we continue to use technological items without any understanding of their operation will our relationship to them become akin to our relationship with rain, grass or mountains: that is we accept they are here but we do not question why.

Website: http://www.playskip.com