FRIDAY 21ST FEBRUARY 2003

TALKING ECO-TECHNOLOGY

Orlando Mathias, Digit

Mathias began by explaining that Digit is a London-based Web design consultancy employing about 25 people. He said: “We felt the need for people to be amused and stimulated, so we began to allow time for research”

We were trying to think of how to do installation work and came up with the word Feed. The ICA asked us to be part of another exhibition and we came up with the concept of a garden in the ICA’s theatre. As you wandered around, you would interact with everything, for example, when opening the door of the garden shed or disturbing motion-tracked blades of grass. This developed into a typographic tree. We started with the idea of voice interaction: you would talk to the tree and your words would grow into its branches.”

There were four styles of tree that could be created and the shape was determined simply by pitch and volume of spoken input. Mathias said: “We wanted to create something that gave an instant response, and in that sense it was a success: we had children ringing their friends and holding their mobiles up to the mushroom containing the microphone.”

The next piece Mathias showed was a digital aquarium, in a glass tank originally created for the launch of the Audi TT, situated outside of the Design Museum. It consisted of 150 mobiles suspended: “Like a shoal of fish. The phones glowed brightly when they rang and we got a sound designer to program their ring-tones. There were numbers printed around the outside of the tank and when those numbers were rung, they caused a pattern of phones in the tank to ring.”

Mathias then showed an idea for a Habitat concept store in Hamburg. Explaining that Habitat has a made-to-order sofa scheme, with a variety of different possible covering materials, and wanted to work out a way of showcasing all of them in the store. So Digit came up with snow-shakers containing different models of sofas, which could be placed in a wooden bowl, along with a cushion covered by the chosen material. When the bowl was taken towards plasma screens, those screens would show a representation of the sofa.

Finally, he demonstrated an item of software which mapped video input in a pseudo-3D manner, appearing to put parts of the image onto blocks (like bricks in a wall), whose length varied according to the darkness of that part of the image. He added: “One idea using this technology would be to project footage of people in a space onto three walls, so that you would be absorbed into a 3D virtual representation of yourself.