Embodied Emotion by Gadi Sassoon

For Gadi Sassoon's installation at Artotel during the London Design Festival, SPOKE founder Tom Fox designed and built a capacitive touch interface using live moss as the sensing medium. Petri dishes of moss were wired into a SPOKE board, turning the living material itself into a set of organic touch sensors.

Embodied Emotion by Milan-based composer and transmedia artist Gadi Sassoon is an exhibition of three connected installations, spanning kinetic sculpture, room-scale projection, sound and interactive media, that give physical form to a decade of research into machines, algorithms, embodiment and feeling. Conceived as a single digital happening, the works translate his musical language of rhythm, texture and orchestration into objects, motion and space.

When visitors touched the moss, their contact triggered a responsive audio-kinetic sculpture — a set of 3D-printed robotic parts that moved in sync with generated sound, translating a human–plant interaction into mechanical motion and audio. The piece explored the boundary between biological and digital interfaces, using a living, growing material as an unconventional input device for a responsive sculptural system.

The work is available to see and interact with as part of London Design Festival from September 12th to 17th. https://londondesignfestival.com/activities/embodied-emotion-by-gadi-sassoon