Mobile-phone emissions become a direct, legible movement of feathers.
Responsive electromagnetic installation · 2011
Feather Tales
A white, book-like object whose feathers rise in response to mobile-phone emissions, turning invisible electromagnetic activity into a ghostly material gesture.
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Project typeArtwork · Installation / environment · Research · Collaboration
ThemesEmbodied & haptic interaction · Materials & making · Speculative & critical design
FormResponsive electromagnetic installation
Developed2011
ContextLa Gaîté Lyrique, Paris
CollaborationEbru Kurbak + Ricardo O’Nascimento
01 · Proposition
Invisible signals write with feathers
Feather Tales gives the Hertzian space surrounding mobile devices a delicate physical presence: an apparently still white surface rises and flickers when a phone comes near.
White feathers rest on a white rectangular block that recalls both a closed book and a soft quilt. A visitor approaching with a mobile phone disturbs this stillness. The device’s electromagnetic emissions are detected inside the object and translated into an abrupt, almost ghost-like lifting of the feathers.
The work developed an idea first explored in Taiknam Hat: externalising the bodily process of horripilation, or goose bumps, through a soft interface. Here the sensing is removed from the wearer and placed in the environment. The feathers appear irritated by signals that continually pass through bodies and rooms but ordinarily remain beyond human perception.
02 · Experience
Approach, detect, rise
- 01
Approach
A visitor brings an active mobile phone close to the apparently still white object.
- 02
Detect
Embedded electronics sense electromagnetic activity that the unaided body cannot ordinarily perceive.
- 03
Rise
The signal is translated into movement, making the feathers lift and flicker like involuntary goose bumps.
03 · Reflection
A blank page for the Hertzian world
The installation does not diagram a network; it lets invisible infrastructure leave a fleeting material trace.
Feather Tales brings together the feather’s histories as insulation, ornament and writing tool. The white block becomes a page on which electromagnetic events briefly write themselves, while the fragile movement suggests irritation, fear, admiration or desire without fixing a single cause. By making a ubiquitous signal strange again, the work asks what it means to depend on devices and infrastructures that sense, remember and orient on our behalf.
A delicate natural material gives electronic sensing an ambiguous emotional expression.
The compact 2011 work established the concept later expanded architecturally in Feather Tales II.
Exhibition history
Selected presentations
Open House
La Gaîté Lyrique
Paris, France
Credits & archive
Project record
- Concept and design
- Ebru Kurbak and Ricardo O’Nascimento
- Research and development support
- La Gaîté Lyrique, Paris
