Nearness
Timo Arnall (British, born 1976) of Oslo School of Architecture and Design (Norway, founded 1961)
Jack Schulze (British, born 1976)
of BERG (UK, founded 2005)
2009
Digital video (color, sound), 1:01 min
The designers of the Touch project—which explores near field communication (NFC), or close-range wireless connections between devices—set out to make the immaterial visible, specifically radio-frequency identification (RFID), used for financial transactions, transportation, and tracking anything from live animals to library books. BERG’s Nearness “addresses the fictions and speculations in the technology” by using a Rube Goldberg machine to explore interaction as an effect of mere proximity, rather than physical contact. In the film, a series of simple reactions are set off by invisible signals—illustrating, in the designers’ words, “the problems of invisibility and the magic of being close.”
Category: Objects
Tags: Interactions / Visualizations / Networks
