Bubble Talk: Translating the presence of modern digital chat into fleeting bubbles

The bubble machine that we created provides person-to-person and person-to-space interaction. The machine has a iris mechanism that varies its outlet size reacting to the participant's speech pattern as if it tries to talk something. Once the participant pauses, the machine blows out various sizes of bubble. The floating bubble represents the subtle state of a message from interpersonal communications that lies in the middle of real and digital world. Also, it creates a certain delay until it pops, which is a metaphor of our behavior that we often delay to send out text-messages through chatting apps. We believe that anyone can be an artist. By open sourcing the details of fabrication process and materials, we want to encourage people to build the machine, interact with it at any locations, and use and modify it as a art tool for realizing their own ideas whether it is for art or not.

"quod, ut dicitur, si est homo bulla, eo magis senex 
(for if,  as they say,  man is a bubble,  all the more so is an oldman) ”
- Marcus Terentius Varro (116 BC - 27 BC),  De Re Rustica 

Speech

Later in the 18th and 19th-century, the connection between bubbles and their fleeting life become more a motive of parody and it is possible to find many sketches of political satire, from this period, representing bubbles as speech of a politician (meaning something nice but with short life) a tradition that lasted until the 20th-century [Pezzoli et al.]. Also, a word and shape of ’bubble’ were used as a graphic convention describing a imaginary form of speech and thought of characters in comic books. 

Inspired from those metaphors of bubble, we introduce an interactive art project representing the ephemeral and intangible properties of human's communication. Once speech is shouted out from a speaker, the sound of speech never lasts and it lost its meaning unless there is a listener. Even if the speech is heard by someone, the message will be forgotten as time goes.

The shapeless, intangible, and invisible speech is transformed into a semi-tangible yet still insubstantial form of visible bubble. To present this art concept, we created a bubble machine that provides person-to-person and person-to-space interaction. We designed the machine which does not show any intention of bubble machine so that no ones can expect what the purpose of the machine is until they interact with it.

This Work was;

• Exhibited in the Tempe Center for Arts (TEI 2019), AZ, US, March, 2019
• Featured in Instructables,  Awarded in Toy Contest (how to build the bubble machine)