What It Would Look Like If Your Smartphone Turned Into An Insect

Imagine if someone turned your most horrifying recurring nightmare into captivating technological art? Smart Bug, a project from design collective NXUX, allows spectators to come within inches of multiple oversized, digitized insects.The terror! The intrigue.

Based in Seoul, NXUX is a collaborative of mixed media and installation artists, software developers, machinery technicians, and graphic designers. Smart Bug was one of several unusual ideas on display at 2013’s Open Call for Da Vinci Idea, a program hosted by Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon. Each year, Seoul Art Space selects ten technological art submissions, and then covers the material fees for the entire process of creating, exhibiting, and marketing each project.

The concept behind Smart Bug stemmed from the observation that society now heavily depends on new technology for human interaction (mostly due to the popularity of smartphones, tablets, and other media devices). NXUX sought a way to both demonstrate and participate in this evolution of communication, while maintaining a hands-off stance on the subject. After preliminary research, the collective decided that huge, mechanical, computerized bugs would be the most fitting way to portray this observed phenomenon (clearly).

"Smart Bug is an installation art that reflects modern society, which involved as and into networks of smart devices. It resembles the way we humans (individual Bugs) communicate in society (Smart Bug Society), the collection of smaller networks," explained Insang Kwak, a member of NXUX.

Kwak also described to The Creators Project how these bugs function:

“Each ‘Smart Bug’ comprises two main elements [the body and legs]. The body is a physical media structure that drives the device’s preliminary orientation and movement. It is affixed onto a multimedia mobile device.”

Kwak continued, elaborating on how the bugs move and communicate: "Six legs control the device’s maneuverability and balance, multiple proximity sensors, networking system, and power source. The multimedia mobile device networks with the body structure, displaying [the Smart Bug’s] motion hub. 3D graphic representations are programmed using UNITY engines, and data input is executed in real time. For an added aesthetic feature, each ‘Smart Bug’ can connect to kinetic sensors that detect and display each device’s position relative to another using light projection mapping.”

"Each Bug can wirelessly communicate and interact with other Bugs, and ultimately with non-bug devices (exhibition visitor’s smart devices or web data, for example)," Kwak elaborated. "Smart Bugs may respond to visitors on their multimedia devices in a sense of social interaction, more like influence and communication than control. On the multimedia device on a Bug, is this humanoid graphic language in motion that corresponds to the Bug’s movement."

"We had total six Smart Bugs for this exhibition. We tested one until we were satisfied with the development and replicated six others to form a Smart Bug Society." "If we had only one, it would reflect an isolated existence, which is also meaningful to talk about. With more bugs, it gets more complicated and social. You will see more responds, interactions, and behaviors that may and may not cause chain reaction among them. Such a complex society is what we intend to recreate, and we’re now developing more Bugs in different design and size to address involved societal structure."

The “Smart Bugs" are robotic and completely artificial, yet they seem to move and communicate organically. Watching the bugs hang out with one another as they crawl around the project’s viewing area (see video above), it’s easy to forget that there’s also a human who is in total control of their activity. In a fascinatingly creative way, NXUX has managed to blur the lines between real personal contact, and interaction filtered through media devices. Also, they illustrate what it would look like if your iPhone were able to scurry away.

Smart Bug also breathes life into perhaps clichéd (nonetheless thought-provoking) questions: Do we completely control technology, or can technology ostensibly exist its own impenetrable world? Can we simultaneously advance as a society while increasing our dependence on mobile media devices? And are e-mails and text messages truly less effective methods of communication than speaking in person? And most importantly: Whoa! Robot bugs!

Below, check out a few behind-the-scenes shots from the opening presentation of Smart Bug: