Touchable

The “Touchable” mural uses the relationship of physical and digital, which is part of the drawing process of dotBot, in a metaphorical way to refer to the concepts of closeness and physical contact in the modern world. It focuses on the paradoxes of physical contact through the digital world, of closeness through solitude and communication through being self-referential. It portrays a figure that creates a self-referential feedback loop of contact. Taking a step further to reinforce the relationship between physical and digital, an extra layer of interactivity was added to the mural (projection mapping on mural). This lever transforms the mural to and open channel of communication between the two worlds. In this new lever of representation the pixels become active and interact with the environmental conditions (human presence). The concept of closeness gains a new perspective, that of the observer’s relationship with the representation (through distance sensors). The proximity of the observer creates interference (glitching) at the drawing and renders it dynamic. The natural world feeds the digital and vice versa through the mural, creating an infinite oscillation between the two.

Dimitris Mairopoulos (οther_robot) (GR)
Dimitris Mairopoulos is a Computational Designer and New Media Artist. He holds a Master of Science in Design and Computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Furthermore, he is a PHD candidate on the fields of Computational Creativity and Creative Robotics and teaches a class on Design Thinking at Mines ParisTech. His work is based on exploring creativity through various computational tools and robotics. He is interested in the amalgamation of digital and physical world- the amalgamation of human and machine and the emergence of post-human creative entities.

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