smart studio | projects

RemoteHome

The first remotely shared appartment

The RemoteHome will be one place of living in two distant cities: London and Berlin.

Communication and media technologies are creating new scenarios of sharing situations of friendship and intimacy over distance. The rise of the mobile phone or instant messaging is indicating these new cultures.
But what will happen if real time mediated communication is becoming part of our everyday environments, the spaces we inhabit, the furniture we use and items we cherish.

The exhibition at Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, is a sketch prototype for the real project to come. The set up is showing two abstracted spaces, London on the left and Berlin on the right side. The furniture becomes part of the media electronic network space. It is designed to tease the respective remote space in a simple to understand way. Just by inhabiting the two environments, the augmented qualities will become apparent.
This asymmetric way of noticing and indicating presence is closer to the real life experiences, creating a sort of tele-synaesthesia that could change our expectation of ambient, ubiquitous media.

The lounge table in London

London

London features an interactive lounge table, that is suspended from the ceiling. When somebody is moving the table top, its surface is turning into an animated object, dissolving the boundaries between physical object and time based media product. The ambient music, that is playing through the table, is than shifted to Berlin. There it is re-emerging in the ‘sound shaft’ which is hanging from the ceiling.

The sound shaft in Berlin

Berlin

The sound shaft is a soft object, suspended over an inflatable couch. It is the source of the music, which is send from the other apartment.
Inhabitants of this space can in turn retaliate with short spoken messages that are reappearing under the lounge table in London. Those German messages are triggered when people in Berlin grab the SoundShaft and move it over a little sensory table. Small light sensors are picking up the movement of a light beam travelling over the sensor field.