In my MA thesis, in 2015, I formulated a design method for reality-altering future devices. The design method is called UP – user presence - and offers a way to think and design a multi-sensorial experience.
During my studies, I created an allergic dress. A wearable and smart textile that changed pattern every time a passer-by intruded upon the wearers' personal space. I was left with a hunger for animated fabrics and multi-sensorial experiences. I studied natural dies and started creating my patterns using seeds and such.
I was looking for an underlying principle to create patterns that could change according to an inner logic. (As a daughter of a modernist artist and architect, I'm always looking for the underlying sense of any interactive system I adopt or create)
I found the only paper Alan Turing ever wrote about chemistry. He explained a mathematical model for the creation of all the patterns in nature. Imagine a pool filled with black liquid. White balls drop in while a niddle bursts the balls. If the niddle bursting the ball is quicker than the falling white balls' rate, a myriad of patterns emerges.
Now I had a continuous phenomenon that organized patterns according to their density. No longer beautiful animal patterns that don't share a communal quality, but a set of patterns that can be organized along a timeline. Why would it matter to me? These are building blocks for a visual language that can express any experience according to its' intensity. I'm a media artist, and these are precisely the organizing phenomena I can use as a driving principle in interactive work.
In 2018 I experienced with taste and scent by creating mouth feel edible agar sculptures, thinking about the way 3d food printing robs us of texture and would soon rob us of nostalgic home memories when everything is turned into a monotonous puree.
In 2019 I received a national prize toward the creation of a fully responsive multi-sensory maze that reacts to the presence and actions of masked visitors. Corona had stopped me in my tracks, sensing the need to rethink masks, and hands - taking edibles from communal holes, and the cultural relevance of the experience of shared tactile space. (I regard the current focus on olfaction as an indication of the hunger toward actual bodily presence)
I sift through my experiences in the last couple of years and found out that what intrigues me the most is the challenge of creating a visual language for scent. A language that could help me create an animated textile that will respond by a continuous change in the presence of smell or sound.