Featured Marketplace Researcher: Benjamin Salter

Benjamin Salter: Personal Digital Manifestations excerpts

PERSONAL DIGITAL MANIFESTATIONS

CONTEMPORARY DIGITAL LIFE AND THE OBJECTS THAT ENABLE IT

The manipulation and crafting of our physical environment is a fundamental and defining human characteristic. The standardized and mass produced urban civilizations we inhabit are becoming increasingly impersonal. As we search for deeper connections and forge meaningful relationships with our environment we face new challenges of integrating the intangible digital content on which we place an increasing importance.

Through a process of enhancing and exaggerating the interaction process, the physicality of Salter’s digital devices may better describe the relationship between individuals and their digital content. Salter endeavors to create objects that represent the intangible digital content they contain, in the hope they may take more aesthetic and meaningful forms to better integrate them into the most personal of environments, our homes.

Through this paper he describes how he has sought to represent one of the most important aspects of individuality and self, expressed within our homes, memory.

Keywords: Kinesthetic / Memories / Tangible / Ritual / Interaction