[Katrin Baumgarten] has fourteen switches that are made to gross you out. From a button that retreats into its hole as your finger approaches, to a mysterious goo-oozing faceplate, to a hairy housing that gets aroused as your try to flip it on, the intrigue is enough to get you to try out the next creepy node in the network. There’s a clip of several different switches after the break and if that’s not enough she’s got more on her Vimeo channel.
[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/13361854]
Funny as hell. I wouldn’t put one in my home tho.
Ugh, did it have to be white goo? Couldn’t it of been green or blue or something?
I’d like to know what that ooz is. I’m not a chem person; ideas anyone?
Tartar sauce?
ew.
Didn’t you say there would be an embedded video at the end of this article?
HAHAHA, This is AWESOME!!!
Wow, I’d want to wear gloves just to use some of these switches. Funny idea to focus on though!
Power companies must love the idea of a gross light switch you don’t want to turn off.
I looked through the videos, but only found 3 switches.. the rest were duplicates of the same.. hair, white goo, and one that moves back.
The truly disgusting thing is that when an artist does some freshman electronics assembly and writes a bunch of BS about “interaction”, it ends up on hackaday.
As mentioned by yuppicide, only three switches videoed despite them being labelled 1-6
Shame the artist didn’t hide or camouflage the IR rangers and holes. I fully expect that they’d claim it’s because anticipation is a large part of disgust, and seeing something unusual on a switch causes you to distrust it, but some on, have some pride in your work.
Having created electronics for other people’s art installations, I would say this is pretty good work if she did it herself. Often artists are too preoccupied with concepts and don’t pay as much attention to the [technical] execution. I have seen some pretty poor “hacks” when it comes to artists building their own structures/mechanisms/etc. and I thought this project was pretty neat and well done. I would have liked more “hair” on the hairy switch though ;-)
this is great :)
Kind of dumb… it looks like there is a sensor on each switch, in a real installation, it would stand out like a sore thumb.
Very entertaining!
that hairy switch is probably one of the most disturbing piece of electronics I’ve come across on this site. it’s even surpasses the condom tester..
hahahaha, the hairy one was… hahahaha