Italian version
.art
21.02.03 Magic Cube, shared sound abstractions.
Two of the more fascinating possibilities of the Net are the collective interaction and the physical reproduction of its unlimited design potential. The abstractions put on screen can give life to mechanisms of participation and construction in the real world. Magic Cube, by Francis Lam, is a project which achieves both of these possibilities with a playful spirit. The user can manipulate two cubes made out of parallelepipeds, each of which, as well as being modifiable, emit a different sound if clicked on its upper side. This simple design, together with the personalization of the parallelepipeds, leads to the creation of interactive artifacts with a unique sound character. Each user identifies himself with his extremely plain avatar (only modifiable in height and color) who lives next to the others. A fixed position, but a position which dignifies all of them just for the fact of being there and manifesting themselves in a collective non-place. In the Magic Cube Community, as well as a gallery of cubes, purposely created and autonomously functioning, there constantly are sounds, movements and alterations of the elements which represent each user, all in a merry-go-round of shapes and sounds. A further evolution of the project has been accomplished in the Co-existence Communication Suite, made with the collaboration of Yasu Santo, where some parallelepipeds have been physically built with servomechanisms which interact with the user's hands, making tangible a design conceived for mouse clicks.