The Hello Cube
Interaction design duo Hellicar & Lewis, who Protein featured in a Profile film last year, have just unveiled their latest project at Tate Modern: The Hello Cube.
Interaction design duo Hellicar & Lewis, who Protein featured in a Profile film last year, have just unveiled their latest project at Tate Modern: The Hello Cube.
The installation, which is part of the current Yayoi Kusama exhibition, is a large cube containing an animated projection that reflects on to a series of internal mirrors. Holes in the box also let visitors poke their arms inside, adding more surfaces for the mesmerising kaleidoscopic projection to bounce off. A camera inside the box then projects the patterns on to a wall in the Turbine Hall.
But how these patterns are made is the most interesting part of the project. Anyone around the world can alter the animations by sending commands through Twitter. It’s what Lewis calls a ‘Twitterable object’. If you want the pattern to get bigger in size and use rippling effects, just tweet ‘bigger ripple’ at the @thehellocube Twitter account. The camera then takes a shot of the results and tweets it back to you.
The design is an example of how interaction design can let people build their own art, and how the role of the designer is to create a platform on which this can happen. Or as Helliver & Lewis put it: ‘we don’t create narratives, we create systems’.
The show is on until 5 June at Tate Modern. Protein will be revealing new work by Joel Gethin Lewis that uses data visualisation to explore food consumption at our forthcoming Something I Ate show at 18 Hewett Street on 27th April.
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