Puzzling Gestures: Creating a Teleoperated Interactive Artwork About Tactility, Structure and Movement

Puzzling Gestures: Creating a Teleoperated Interactive Artwork About Tactility, Structure and Movement

(Long paper)

Keywords: Glass, waterjet, electronics, gesture, puzzle, digital sculpture, prototype, rapid tooling, interactivity, teleoperation, touch screen.

This paper presents the initial stages of prototyping a digitalsculptural project that mines conventionally undesirable artifacts of mass production and material residue for their expressive worth. These artifacts are used as both inspiration and raw material to transform touch and movement into reflexive structures. This is done in the form of a remote controlled ‘teleoperated’ interactive artwork. This artwork, called Gesture Puzzles, is inspired by antique glass and wood-framed dexterity puzzles that use a player’s hand movements to maneuver a marble through a maze. The piece describes practical collaborative methods that use creative electronic process to exploit both desired and undesired material residues from molten pressed glass, waterjet cutting and touch screen interfaces.