The Responsive Object – unfinished
Research
2024 – 2025
A Collaborative Exploration of Material Interactivity and Post-Humanist Creation. This project explores the politics of hospitality and it wishes to reflect on how we offer space, care, and connection in our increasingly fragmented world.
Description
The Responsive Object Exists! was a collaborative research-creation project that brought together students and emerging artists to imagine and construct an interactive composite object. Conceived as a mediating device, the object explored alternative forms of communication and connection between materials, bodies, and audiences.
Emerging from the broader research-creation project Meeting Through Materialities, Bodies and Words, this initiative investigated diverse materials—such as glycerine, motorized structures, foam, sound sensors, protocols and voices—could be assembled into an architectural, organism-like form responsive to human proximity and touch.
The project unfolded as a speculative inquiry into post-humanist collaboration, audience participation, and embodied environmental consciousness. It aimed to awaken a renewed sense of mutual care through interactive design, encounters between unknown others engaging with the precariousness of life on our planet through grounded, material practices.
The final object is intended for a tour in peoples homes and for a public presentation at MILIEUX – Institute for Arts, Culture and Tecnology – Concordia University. The Responsive Object will be integrated into the forthcoming research-creation cycle, Keep in touch! – critical embodiments for possible future(s) (2025–2028).
Emerging from the broader research-creation project Meeting Through Materialities, Bodies and Words, this initiative investigated diverse materials—such as glycerine, motorized structures, foam, sound sensors, protocols and voices—could be assembled into an architectural, organism-like form responsive to human proximity and touch.
The project unfolded as a speculative inquiry into post-humanist collaboration, audience participation, and embodied environmental consciousness. It aimed to awaken a renewed sense of mutual care through interactive design, encounters between unknown others engaging with the precariousness of life on our planet through grounded, material practices.
The final object is intended for a tour in peoples homes and for a public presentation at MILIEUX – Institute for Arts, Culture and Tecnology – Concordia University. The Responsive Object will be integrated into the forthcoming research-creation cycle, Keep in touch! – critical embodiments for possible future(s) (2025–2028).
Credits
Initiated by Lília Mestre in collaboration with Concordia graduate students Mike Cassidi, Pauline Lomami, Koko Mariano and Aaron Richmond and is supported by the MILIEUX Institute, Concordia University.
The object transmits a poem composed by VK Preston which is a memory from the research-creation Through Materialities, Bodies and Words also initiated by Lília Mestre.
The object transmits a poem composed by VK Preston which is a memory from the research-creation Through Materialities, Bodies and Words also initiated by Lília Mestre.