Practices with the Exploratory Science Museum

The workshop “Light, Sound, Movement: Action!” marked the public debut of the interactive installation InstInt, an important product of the socioenactive systems project.

The InstInt installation allows children and adults to create a sound “composition” by playing light strips that represent the sounds of musical instruments (in this specific workshop: drums, flute, organ, clavinet and bass). According to the interaction of the participants, the installation produces light and sound effects and has a robotic structure that moves by opening, closing and turning to the left or right.

Through the exploration of the installation, this workshop involved the concept of sound and its different representations. Each light strip, when touched, activates a certain instrument of a melody, and all the sounds generated in the environment are captured to produce, in real time, a graphic representation of the ambient sound.

In this second workshop, three new interactive installations were explored from works carried out within the scope of the project with the theme of deep time:

• TangiTime: tangible table that explores geological eras through interactive physical objects representative of them, and that can be manipulated on the table.
• CronoBit: musical instrument for, through two drums, to experience the passage of time metaphorically in a process of erosion or in the evolution of a species.
• Temporário: An educational video that reacts according to how many people are watching, increasing its speed or rewinding in black and white.

After interacting with each of the installations, the participating children and adolescents were invited to answer small challenging questions related to the concept of deep time and the installations.

The Institute of Geosciences, with the support of the Exploratory Science Museum, both at Unicamp, set up an exhibition with about 100 small models of dinosaurs and other organisms from the past and some replicas of fossils. The exhibition was created to learn a little more about the life and habits of these animals that inhabited the Earth millions of years ago.

Our interactive installation, TangiTime, was exhibited for the first time in the same space as the dinosaur exhibition. The installation allowed visitors (children and adults) to explore geological eras through interactive physical objects representing them. The physical objects have embedded technology, for example, the dragonfly can move its wings and the dinosaurs' eyes change color.

The exhibition of TangiTime was proposed and conducted by researcher Yusseli Lizeth Méndez Mendoza as part of her master's project, in the context of the Socioenactive Systems project.

In this first workshop, the interaction with three interactive installations from works carried out within the scope of the project was explored:

• Lobo-Guará: built with cardboard, synthetic fabric, the wolf has hidden buttons and sensors that trigger audiovisual information about the animal.
• Memoção: black box with textures inside that, when pressed, trigger a meme (image and sound) associated with the sensation of that texture.
• Monolito: Miniature monolith with motion sensors to interact with 360° projected scenes from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

In addition, the participating children and adolescents were invited to create, during the workshop, a small interactive artifact: a “magic potion” (an LED connected to a battery and a magnetic sensor) activated by a “magic wand” (a wand of paper with a neodymium magnet on the tip).