We’ve been invited to contribute to the ‘Analogue is the new Digital’ exhibition as part of the AND Festival in Manchester in October ’10. It’s a modest fee of £400 and Nick and I are still deciding what work we could produce.

We’ve proposed a couple of ideas i response to the brief… attached as a PDF – analogue-digital

1. The Underwhelming Zoetrope

We propose building a traditional zoetrope – or perhaps its successor the praxinoscope (which improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors).

The physical device will be hand wound, traditionally styled and embellished with Victoriana design elements and features – an essentially faithful reproduction of the popular parlour toy of its era.

But instead of producing content traditionally associated with the zoetrope – such as the chronophotographic sequences of animal locomotion captured by Eadweard Muybridge – we intend to make a series of subtle and downbeat animations that “reflect the omnipresence of computers and digital devices within society” e.g. the blinking of LEDs on a wireless router, the flashing screen and vibration of a mobile phone responding to an incoming call.

We’ll print a series of these animation strips and spread them on the table top next to the zoetrope so users can swap and view them in the device and also take them away as souvenirs.

We think the piece will establish a thought-provoking internal dialogue by disengaging the delivery system from the content, separating them temporally and then contrasting the traditional analogue “device of wonder” with contemporary design evoking digital ubiquitousness and mundanity.

We’re also thinking about providing some blank templates – so users can hand draw their own contribution – and perhaps developing a simple desktop or online application that will enable motivated users to contribute personal animation strips from their own sequence of images.

2. The Modular Musical Box

We propose building a modular version of the traditional musical box – possibly including a representation of a dancing ballerina automaton – inspired by the minimalist controller design of monome.org. The piece will consist of several interconnected, “plug’n’play” boxes which will collectively reproduce the functionality of the decorative 19th century clockwork musical instrument.

At the centre of the piece will be an electro-magnetic rotary sequencer – with a ‘playhead’ made up of a line of hall effect sensors and a revolving spindle on which is placed a clear acrylic disk embedded with small magnets arranged in a regular circular grid – replacing the set of pins on the revolving cylinder that plucks the tuned teeth of a steel comb in the traditional device.

We’ll also build additional units: a self contained and ‘tweakable’ sound source (to hear the musical output); a clockwork-like winder (to spin the disk and “play” the melody);  and time-allowing – a persistence of vision (POV) display (to display the ballerina).

These modular components  will draw on monome’s minimalist design aesthetic and utilise the same restricted material palette of walnut, brushed aluminium, translucent silicon and orange LEDs. All the necessary power, electronic components, Arduinos and shields will be hidden within the various boxes which will be ‘daisy-chained’ to each other via single USB cables.

We’ll make a series of interchangeable disks which will each play a different melody – probably of populist TV show themes and adverts for ubiquitous brands.

The work raises issues of the commodification of music as branded sonic indent while attempting to recapture something of the sense of craft and workmanship, refined aesthetics and genteel appreciation of the iPods of their day – refocussed through the minimalist design aesthetic and tactile ergonomics of the monome.

We consider that the work explores exhibition themes such as the “materialisation of data”, “the tactile digital” and the “invisibility of technology” but we do acknowledge we’re proposing essentially digital devices – albeit styled as analogue ones – and this is not strictly in the spirit of the brief. So we suppose we’re proposing our own counterpoint to the theme – “Digital is the new Analogue!” 😉