Communicating Pillows and Melodised Pillow Hammock created distinct encounters within one exhibition.
Interactive sound installations · 2015
BLESS N°53 CONTENTTENDERS
Two interactive sound installations developed by POPKALAB for BLESS N°53, turning pillows and a hammock into tactile encounters with time and music.
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Project typeArtwork · Installation / environment · Collaboration
ThemesEmbodied & haptic interaction · Materials & making · Speculative & critical design
FormInteractive sound installations
Year2015
ContributionInteraction and technical development
Presentedmfc–Michèle Didier, Paris
01 · Proposition
Listening becomes a bodily encounter
For BLESS N°53 Contenttenders, POPKALAB developed the interactive systems for two works that move sound into soft domestic structures.
Contenttenders was an exhibition made to measure by BLESS for the art publisher mfc–Michèle Didier. Across the gallery, pillows became supports, containers and interfaces for works from the publisher’s catalogue, bringing artist editions into a tactile and domestic setting.
02 · Experience
Activate, communicate, inhabit
- 01
Activate
Pressing, handling or throwing one of the Communicating Pillows begins an alternating recital from On Kawara’s One Million Years.
- 02
Communicate
A wireless network lets the male- and female-voiced pillows respond as an interdependent pair rather than as separate objects.
- 03
Inhabit
Within the Melodised Pillow Hammock, visitors physically occupy an interactive sound environment built around Christian Marclay’s Ephemera.
03 · Reflection
Listening becomes material and social
The installations move sound away from a frontal display and into objects that invite touch, repose and proximity.
Communicating Pillows distributes On Kawara’s immense chronology across two objects that function only together, turning time into a physical and social exchange. The hammock makes Christian Marclay’s graphic score present through posture and contact. In both works, familiar furniture-like forms become active interfaces: listening is no longer only observed from a distance, but held, moved and occupied.
The two speaking pillows alternate years and operate through their technical interdependence.
Pillows, textiles and a suspended structure make sound dependent on bodily contact and position.
Credits & archive
Project record
- Concept and design
- BLESS / Desirée Heiss and Ines Kaag
- Interactive development
- POPKALAB — Ricardo O’Nascimento, Erik Overmeire and Tineke Van Hilten
- Commissioning publisher and venue
- mfc–Michèle Didier, Paris
- Programme and curatorial framework
- Michèle Didier and Emanuele Quinz
- Exhibition photography
- Charles Duprat
