News

2005.09.29

We announce the public release of "Low tech sensors and actuators", a collaboration between Haque Design + Research and Aether Architecture.

Commissioned by the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, we developed a suite of low-tech sensors and actuators using electronic children's toys and gadgets that can be hacked for their constituent parts. In this way, artists and architects can quickly and cheaply develop interactive spaces and objects. The outcome of the project was an instruction manual of sorts, a manifesto for low-tech, a conceptual framework for complex interactive systems.

IR toys as proximity sensors, cats as interfaces, torches as power sources, walkie talkies as wireless networks. Have a look at our PDF report at lowtech.propositions.org.uk.

"What is needed now is a research paradigm, a framework of meaning and practice which derives from technology, from the process of making things, from the concept of 'know-how'. It will use design and production methods as the cutting edge. It will accept the idea of deterministic processes which are unpredictable."
S. Groak, "The Idea of Technology, and Its Critics"

There is an attitude among artists and architects working today with human spaces where actual testing is just as important as envisioning. People who build are now the ones who really push the envelope of the discipline: treading the fine line between using technology and being used by it; considering art and architecture as research; and negotiating the sometimes vague boundary between using and being used by corporations whose technology we design and experiment with.
"...The new imaginists are people who attempt to turn automatic apparatuses against automation."
Vilem Flusser

We propose the creation of a web forum, a carefully designed knowledge space that is aimed at accumulating and maturing the above concepts. The discourse would be around the new attitude of researchers as artist or architects, why this method came about and why it became the choice of an emerging generation.

For information, please email info [at] propositions.org.uk.