I/O Brush
The World as Palette

2004

Kimiko Ryokai (US)
Stefan Marti (US)
Hiroshi Ishii (US) (JP)

Painting without watercolors or oils—instead, all you need is your environment and its movements, hues and structures. I/O Brush opens up completely new possibilities for those who love painting!

To work with this installation, an artist needs a monitor screen, an interesting setting and a special brush that, at first glance, looks to be a common, everyday paintbrush but actually conceals within its barrel a tiny video camera, light sources and touch sensors. By stroking the brush over an object to be reproduced, it can record colors, structures and motion in its environment like a fountain pen sucking up ink, and then reproduce them on screen. In this way, any artist can compile his/her own personal color palette.

The technology is ingenious. The light sources surrounding the camera are activated as soon as the brush touches a surface. To accomplish this, the brush has been outfitted with flexible, spring-loaded sensors that work like the bristles of a paintbrush. The system reads the frames fed in by the camera and stores them to memory. As soon as the brush has been loaded with “paint,” the fiberoptic filaments within the brush’s bristles begin to glow.

I/O Brush has been set up with three modes to record texture, color and movement. In texture mode, the system saves a snapshot consisting of a single frame recorded of the surface over which the brush was just passed. In color mode, the artist records the environmental color whose RGB value is most frequently registered and can then work with that color. And in movement mode, up to 100 sequential frames are recorded to thereby place “movement” at the artist’s fingertips.

The artist can work as long as he/she wants with a particular brush-load of “paint” and can refill at any time as well. Sweeping the brush briskly across the screen produces a watercolor effect; slower brushstrokes give the impression of a more intensive application of color.

The “canvas” is an LCD screen with an integrated graphics tablet. The position of the brush on the screen is recognized by the system, and the brushstrokes on the screen are linked with film sequences that document the location at which the brush picked up the particular load of “paint.” This opens up to both the painter as well as the audience a glimpse into the story behind a particular palette of hues.