Thawing colours: dangling from the fuzzy end of interfaces

In this paper we present Thawing Colours, a tactile, visual and

sonic installation, which uses suspended spheres of melting ice

to paint on surfaces, woollen strings to provide a means of

interaction, and concatenative synthesis–the stitching together

of many small fragments of sound–to provide a digitally

mediated response to motion and vibration by resynthesizing

the input sound using a corpus of pre-prepared sounds. In one

sense, it is an evolving, site-specific physical installation, a

painter or designer that produces images over the course of

several days. With some intellectual license, it can be taken as a

naturalistic interface for querying a database of sounds, or as a

particularly large and unwieldy musical instrument. It is

literally a fuzzy interface, with boundaries extending out

through the fibres of the woollen strands used to attach

coloured balls of ice, and through the supporting cables into the

foundations of the building, and through the fingers, palms, and

bodies of the participants. We argue that there is a niche for

interfaces that are whimsical, ludic and exploratory, and that as

part of exploring this niche, we can take an ecosystemic view

on interfaces: embracing their physical properties, their

situation in an environment, and the byproducts and feedbacks

therein.