Sustainable art

Interaction design for sustainable performance art

CLIENT:

National Center for the Arts (Mexico City) and Artist Natalie Jeremijenko

ROLE:

Part of the Engineering team tasked with constructing the physical piece for the artists’s display

CHALLENGE:

How might we create an interactive bike that can move and be displayed whilst conveying the artist’s vision.

Design Requirements : A platform to showcase a sustainable LED advertisement through persistence of vision POV light.

OUTCOME:

We observed human reactions when approaching on/off installations, what surprised them? what were the moments of delight? which were the design attributes that facilitated reflection?

We prototyped a simple light that turned on with a proximity sensor, but this wasn’t enough to incite conversation around sustainability, we needed the spectator to participate in the process.

We finally constructed a wire-suspended bike that rolled thanks to rubber bearings connected to hand drills. Initially , the bike needed only to start on proximity with the observer and then stop as it left, engaging the public into a more interactive experience, we accomplished this with a proximity sensor and a relay driver Integrated Circuit to turn the drills on and off. However, to engage the public even further, the bike needed to accelerate the closer the spectator got to it , so an Arduino program with an ultrasonic proximity sensor and a dimmer was implemented.

Jeremijenko’s Bike x Messenger installation featured a moving bike with a proximity sensor that rolled at 10 km/h to

MORE INFO:

This Project was a part of the Transitio_MX06, a multimedia festival presented by the National Centre for the Arts (CENART). The festival aims to be a platform for artistic creations linked to technology, as well as hybrid productions generated by the intersection between art, science, technology and social analysis.

The exhibition’s main pieces were by Natalie Jeremijenko, electronic engineer and artist who aims to create environmental awareness through scientific pieces with an artistic spin. The Engineering Hub was responsible for making the systems needed to display those pieces, thus allowing me to collaborate on artistic ideas with mechanical and electronic arrangements.

This project was extremely exciting for me; it was a close encounter with artists, art performance technology and in situ arrangements.