City as vibro-tactile rhythms
“The project allows walkers to feel the spatial form of the urban grid at their location as vibro-tactile rhythms on their body. The rhythms of the urban grid are parameterized by local conditions as the walker encounters them, reflecting the influence of time, light, temperature and humidity on the experience of space. Augmenting the everyday activity of walking the city with a tactile experience challenges participants to think about the interrelation of vision and touch in their experience of space. The void of purely optical space is thickened with palpable sensations, creating a tactile space that can only be explored by moving through it. Tactile displays are usually applied to provide orientation information in unusual phenomenal environments, such as virtual reality, deep sea diving, and zero gravity environments. In Palpable City, this process is reversed; instead of providing a stable spatial reference in unusual conditions, the technology is used to make the usual experience of space unusual.”
Erik is now working on a PhD with our friends at the Topological Media Lab at Concordia, and background to all this can be found in his MS Thesis: Tactile Space (pdf)
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