Voice Boxes


'Natalie Jeremijenko Natalie Jeremijenko

Interaction: this word describes all of the rich, complex, nuanced or simple ways in which we engage with the world. With a strange irony, the corporate imagination has hijacked this word to pronounce many of the new microprocessor based technologies "Interactive" multimedia. A misconstruction of the multiplicity of human interactions into a saleable product package.

The voice box is a very simple object, designed to rethink in hardware how interaction can be modeled in a product.

Object oriented sound – literally – the voice boxes speak against technical metaphors of interaction as point-and-click. These are real icons-in-the-wild: digital objects embedded in the actual world, that can be manipulated, configured and arranged in 3D. Unlike high-end 3D convolvulators used to simulate 3-dimensional sound environments, the voice boxes depend on you having something to say – and somewhere to put it. They model the informality of human exchange and exploit the rich complexity of a real world coordinate system.

Object
Aluminum box: records, stores, plays 12 seconds of digital sound [voices]

To insert voice
open lid.

To play
tilt, shake, lift, throw, drop or tip box.

To situate
place voice box in public place.