Lift with Fing 09: Timo Arnall: "Making Things Visible" from Lift Conference on Vimeo.
Timo ends this splendid talk from Lift by talking about trying to get to a future less full of 'glowing rectangles'. Which made me think of a couple of things.
I went to see Hauschka a few weeks back who did all sorts of wonderful things with a prepared piano. I'd always thought of prepared piano as a Cage-y thing, more intellectual than listenable, but Herr Bertelmann made it playful and pleasant. Adding simple, everyday things to the piano gave it loads of new textures and tones, and gave it a sort of clustered variety, so adjacent strings/keys produced quite different results. The musical 'code' (as expressed through his fingers) was filtered through a lumpy unpredictable physicality.
And for some reason it made me wonder if anyone had ever done interesting things with Prepared Screens. Whether taking the standard rectangular monitor and adding lenses, mirrors, filters, glasses, cellophane, magnifiers etc and then designing something for that prepared screen (or, even, not) might help overcome the 'bored with screens' problem. Not necessarily for steampunk affect, but to do the same thing to a screen as Hauschka does to a piano - reveal new, unexpected, unpredictable possibilities. Imagine designing something for a screen knowing that there's a big magnifying bit in the upper left hand corner. Something that alters pixels like a prepared piano alters the strings. Not through altering the code, through altering the screen.
So I started looking for prepared screens online, thinking they had to be a discarded cliche of Interaction Design shows by now, but I haven't found many examples. I'm probably looking for the wrong thing, in the wrong places.
I also imagined I'd seen them in lots of films but could only really remember the screens from Brazil. Which, while wonderful, aren't quite what I was imagining. In my head I'm thinking of something prettier and more distorting. I'll keep looking.
Anyway.