This is the real reason why I have been working on SiNK, the software I just released. Broadly I am working towards a tool to make what I'm calling invisible scenography, the ability to use a computer to describe layers of sound and light in a space that others can encounter with their bodies.
As a UX designer I always look for real-world use cases to anchor the work. The invisible scenography idea is vivid and clear in my own head, but I can't really describe it until I'm finished (then I can show it to you). In the meantime, I've been working with a number of other artists and theater folks here in Switzerland around particular problems that they have. This is both extremely fun and allows me to collect information about what should and shouldn't be included in the system I'm building.
One of the people I'm working with is artist and physicist Hillary Sanctuary (the woman in the above photo), who designed and built an instrument she calls the Solinaphone. The Solinaphone can be played with mallets like a traditional percussion instrument, but Hillary has been working Alain Crevoisier, an engineer at EPFL who constructed a set of electronic hammers and dampers which can be used to play the instrument via MIDI. Earlier this week, for the 2012 Lausanne La Nuit des Musées (something like the Swiss equivalent of First Night), we connected a prototype of SiNK to Alain's system and the Solinaphone itself, so that visitors could play a song sequence by "conducting" with their hands.
This was an early experiment, and there is a lot of work to do to make it a beautiful and engaging experience, but we are actively trying. Most importantly, while it is very much a real instrument, the Solinaphone sounds amazing even with a crowd of children banging randomly on it, which means it pretty much automatically fulfills my first rule of making art with tech: the piece still needs to work when the power is switched off.
Solinaphone Hammers from Andrew Sempere on Vimeo.
