References:
Emanuele Coccia, Reversing The New Global Monasticism, Fall Semester 2020
Moreover, we choose to augment objects so that they not only intermediate every day or canonicalized social activity in relation to ordinary use, but also to offer potentially extraordinary affordance [32] within a social scenario. For example, in our case, the ordinary glass and the wine within provides the affordance to drink or grab (habitual actions), while simultaneously affording the sonic responses caused by actions performed with the glass, actions that immediately transform it into an extra-ordinary object. Also, an empty glass may offer more possibilities for playful engagement than one containing liquid, where the sound feedback is caused by explorative actions. Boundary objects automatically register the relations between and among people in a social space. The objects we called instruments that regulate the relationship between the people and the sounds that are correlated to specific activities. By contrast, the way in which directly facilitating the participants’ role in the process may not be not as explicit as our observations suggest–this data can be misleading–especially from an affective/emotional perspective.
We can also regard these boundary objects as “cultural probes” [29] that make tangible the enactment of social relations among a group of people. Cultural probes such as what we have built have been employed in design research since the 1990’s [30]. In our work, by augmenting ordinary tableware with motion sensors and gesturally modulated, computationally synthesized sound, we can precisely calibrate the extraordinariness of the ‘voicing’ of their movement and vary the mapping from movement or people’s relational activity to sound as extra-linguistic sonic field correlated to their activity. Most importantly, computational control allows experimentalists and the participants to repeat the effect in a reproducible way to gain experiential knowledge. This approach is informed by Satinder Gill’s work on tacit engagement and collective, relational engagement via embodied skilled practices.
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