Touch is often used as a reality-check: what you can touch is real. It is a proof that our bodies and the world around us remain anchored in the physical reality. Lyta aims at reconnecting these the physical with the digital through touch and the usage of tactile media and haptic technologies.

Lyta -commissioned for the science center Phaeno in Wolfsburg, Germany- consists of two kinetically-charged surfaces, placed 100 metres from each other, and linked telematically so that deformations induced by touching each one are transmitted to the other interactively: when the structure is touched on one site, the touch will be visible and touchable on another.

This networked sculpture haptically connects people at distant locations. It is based on a novel biomimetic haptic displacement transmission network developed in collaboration with Merlin Systems, a robotics firm based in Plymouth, UK.

Furthermore, the visitors’ touches will remain as shape-traces in the memory of the installation. In the moments of low activity, the installation will bring the traces back to the surface of the structures. |yt_A’s software will use the visitors’ traces to create new shapes and body-forms: the traces will be mixed, transformed and grown, as if the visitors’ touch has ‘fertilized’ this anorganic form that became alive and autonomous.

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