Play Hacks
2018SPATIAL RESEARCH, EXPERIMENTS
Leading up to Íchni, experiments were conducted to explore how we can be made more aware of our everyday movements in the format of playful interventions. Existing spaces are hacked to become interactive installations that disrupts our habits.
1. Mind your Step investigates the “rupturing” of the habitual behaviour of climbing up or down a flight of stairs. Time-based kinetic obstacles were inserted into a flight of stairs to jolt users’ awareness during the act of climbing, disrupting what the body would normally anticipate from a typical environment of a staircase.
2. Don’t be a Couch Potato confronts the passivity of sitting as an audience. The seats of an auditorium were hacked into a remote controller of a movie, made using conductive pads and tape that were affixed throughout the auditorium seats. The movie was programmed to be distorted, with the colours inverted, speed either too fast or slow, pixels glitched. The audience were made to use their bodies to connect and activate the conductive buttons to swtich off the distortions, and had to 'work' to watch the movie proper. By tapping on the body’s natural conductivity, the body was made to actively interface with the material environment.
3. Bench Hack converts a concrete outdoor bench into a topographical musical surface, where each contour, when rotated, produces a melody. The bench becomes a musical instrument that encourages users to use their body—and twist and turn them into unusual positions—to activate the melody.
