GMU:The Unstrument/Azucena Sanchez

Y/A GLOVES - TRANSMEDIALE 2016 - In collaboration with Yvonne Götzl

It is obvious we come from a natural world for artificial purposes. We have come from earth to create fiction, to imagine the future, sense our present and decide our past. In order to feel connected with the world we touch things, but a device as simple as gloves may change our mind very easily about our perception of the world. We are no longer satisfied with the world we are living in, this is why we are always looking a way to enhance our senses. Fiction then becomes real, technology becomes natural and we end up forgetting how unexpected nature can be. We have will, we have freedom, do we choose technology or nature? Either way we always end up lost in our beliefs and in our own fiction.

IDEA

Create two devices (gloves) that will develop an idea of fiction in people through the enhancement of their senses. Our first idea was to build two devices with different materials, one would be made out of branches and the other one would be made out of metal. We started by building the metal glove first, as we were getting the materials and shaping it, we showed it to some people and it was very interesting to see the way they were reacting to it. Each time someone tried them, they became a different person.

At the same time in "The Unstrument" seminar, we were introduce to many ideas and many circuits related to sound. We started playing with speakers and with a small research on resonance through the body, we decided it would be great to place a speaker on the palm part of the glove.

GLOVES

We were introduced to the 555 timer chip. Two circuits were created out of it, one was the timer and the other was the modulation. We included photocells or light sensors to make sound react to light. When we tried this on the speaker we realized it was truly amazing how the speaker made sounds that would show us the movement of our hands, the sound changed also according to the position of the hand, not only the light.

We needed one input and one output for the two hands. One hand was going to be the metal one and the other one a textile glove holding the speaker. Metal is a conductive material, this is why we decided to place LED's on the fingertips so the photocells in the textile hand would react to the light in a more accurate way.

Input = Light

Output = Sound

For the other pair of gloves we decided to build them also with similar materials, metal and textile. This way we were going to see the reaction of people and their decision making process by having two similar devices doing different things.

The second metal hand was going to have a different aesthetic. We were looking for something created out of raw materials, metal wire. First we shaped the wire into tube forms to then have the shape of a finger, the rest of the hand followed the same process. We incorporated piezo elements in each one of the fingertips of the hand, it made sense for the rounded end of each finger showed us the path to each piezo element. The wires connected to the piezos looked like the veins of the hand.

For both pair of gloves we wanted to show what we were doing, the circuits, the cables were there for people to see. We wanted people to create their own fictional story about the gloves, that is why we decided not to hide anything.

REFERENCE

We were given some ideas about gloves made through history... an interpretation of what the future looked like in the past, in the 80's to be more precise. This inputs lead us to think of what were we trying to accomplish through the incorporation of electronics into the gloves. We wanted something simple and at the same time, something sort of deceiving. Our story, our fiction, was going to be the expectancy of future in our hands... the gloves.