take 2 Exp.Inst.Rain from Balam Soto on Vimeo.In his native Guatemala, interactive artist Balam Soto is a “Maestro" of Visual Arts, thanks to an honor by his country’s National Congress. Like a cyberpunk from a William Gibson novel, Soto blends low and high tech to create interactive art installations, for his own studio and Open Wire Lab, both located in Hartford, Connecticut.Using software, touch sensors, plexiglass tubes, projections and sound, Soto’s latest, Exp.Inst.Rain, blurs artistic boundaries. He describes it as both an interactive installation and “experimental instrument.”
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“Although I am not a musician, my original idea for the instrument came from my love for electronic music,” Soto tells The Creators Project. “I wanted to make a musical instrument using physical computing concepts and exploring tangible interfaces. The instrument would offer a seamless symbiotic relationship between art and digital technologies and, as an extension, between music and the visual arts.”Soto says Exp.Inst.Rain builds on five other progressive versions of this work crafted over the last few years. Each iteration is tweaked based on both observations made by Soto and taken from participant feedback.
“The hardware is all custom electronics that I developed; these include touch electrodes made from copper, PCBs, and breakout boards,” Soto says. “The Arduino provides the heart of this artwork and monitors the touch electrodes and generates data that is broadcast wirelessly to my custom software. The wireless connections are powered by an XBee wireless controller.”Ideally, Exp.Inst.Rain should encourage individuals to make sounds and music even if they've never played an instrument before.
“I want them to have fun experiencing technology through a creative process, to experience the fusion of high tech with low tech,” Soto says. “I’ve had fantastic feedback from musicians and the general public as I have developed and improved the instrument. That process itself has been exciting for me as an artist.”
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