Papier- and fabric-mâché, capacitive sensors, speakers, ESP32, Raspberry Pi, Pure Data patch.
Some years ago, after outfitting a number of light fixtures in my apartment with smart bulbs exclusively controllable by smartphone, I was surprised to find myself longing for the tactility, the materiality, of operating a physical light switch. Having performed that interaction so unconsciously for so long, why now was I so acutely aware of its absence? I slowly came to realize that it was yet another byproduct of technological convergence: interface collapse. As one more interaction disappeared behind the all-too-familiar glass of my phone screen, all the subtle textures and haptic information it once provided vanished from my tactile repertoire, replaced by a humble configuration of pixels (and maybe, if I was lucky, a vibration not too dissimilar from all the others).
Touchstone is an interactive sculptural installation created as a collaboration between myself, Thalia Godbout, and RJ Remesat in the context of Professor Joel Ong’s “Vertical Studio I” course at York University in the winter of 2025. Combining papier-mâché and repurposed fabric scraps with capacitive sensors and granular synthesis, the project straddles the threshold between the worlds of craft and code, of material histories and digital potentials. At the core of its conception lies a central observation much like the above: as our computational interfaces increasingly adopt capacitive glass as their primary material, diversity in the tactile field collapses. The wealth of receptors at our fingertips, so remarkably evolved, is increasingly met with little more than cool, pristine smoothness. Touchstone offers a disruption to that trend, explicitly designed to invite tactile exploration of the various textiles comprising its shell. Curiosity is rewarded when participants make contact with inconspicuously-placed capacitive sensors on the artwork’s surface, triggering changes in the low, rumbling drone emanating from within, unfurling it into discernible sounds of rubbing and scraping. Touchstone is a human-computer interface that purposefully asserts its materiality, proudly presenting itself as more than just a means to an end. It invites participants to slow down and spend time with its tactile offerings, emancipating them from the single-mindedness of task completion, of urgent access to computation. Like an antidote to Cartesian mind-body dualism in machine form, Touchstone‘s ‘body’ is restored its due honour, and invites us—through the embodied, relational act of touch—to extend this same gift of restoration to our own.
Photo by Thalia Godbout, featuring Jubelle Paa.