12 August

The ring built in light instead of matter.
Started wanting something simple: black background, a piece of pink-orangeish
fluoro acrylic like a donut, light coming straight from the back. It became a
raymarched WebGL page (standalone, not on the site) and then, decision by
decision, it became the phenomenon itself:

  Black → absolute. The light source is never seen; light exists only where
  the ring captures it. (Darkness isn't staging — darkness is a *cause* of
  phosphenes. The prisoner's cinema: deprived of input, the visual system
  generates its own.)
  Perfect torus → non-perfect. Radius wanders, tube swells and thins,
  surface crawls. It shifts, appears, disappears slightly. From the 5 Aug
  notes, almost word for word.
  Pink-orange → white. Then brighter — blinded, the dots behind the eyelids.
  Overexposure as fidelity.
  Connectivity: it breaks. First attempt shattered it into petals — wrong,
  it stopped being a ring. Now it breaches at ONE point only, yawns into a
  C, and seals. The break wanders so it never opens in the same place.

Then the thing I didn't expect: pressure. Press and hold, and the ring
knits shut, plumps, floods back to intensity. Only afterwards did the
research confirm it — pressure phosphenes are the canonical kind, the
pressed eye, Purkyně's own experiment. The interaction isn't a UI gesture;
it re-enacts the phenomenon.

What else modulates phosphenes: blood flow (standing up too fast — they
ride on pulse), heat, stress, fatigue, migraine, electrical/magnetic
stimulation, cosmic rays (astronauts see flashes in the dark). And darkness
itself. A possible inversion to keep: light that grows the longer the
visitor does nothing — stillness and pressure both producing light.

Squish mode — the good hack. A camera stops being a camera: a translucent
object rests on the lens, the camera stares up into the material and
measures the light filtering through. Squeeze → darker → pressure. Light
through translucent matter as the *sensing principle*, not just the look.
No electronics in the object at all.

Piloted it for real: iPhone as plinth. Phone lies flat, object over the
back camera, page open via QR/URL; a tiny relay carries the squeeze to the
ring on the laptop. The response is eased — pressure arrives over a couple
of seconds, like warmth, and leaves slower. It settles rather than snaps.
A next idea, untested with real hands: multiple phones connected to the
one ring. The relay is already built for it — pressures combine as a soft
union, so one full squeeze saturates and gentle squeezes from different
hands reinforce each other. Cooperation rewarded. To try with a second
person.

Which opens the edition idea: cast silicone objects sold as keys to one
shared, live ring. Everyone has phosphenes; nobody can see anybody else's —
this would invert that: a private closed-eye image made communal, pressed
into visibility by many hands. Lineage to sit inside: Lozano-Hemmer
(Remote Pulse — strangers feeling each other's heartbeat across the border;
Vectorial Elevation), Goldberg's Telegarden, Ishii's inTouch. The rare part
is the *owned object as instrument* — participants become owners.

The object itself, still open:
• A formless milky dome — a pressed-eye stone. Form withheld from the hand;
  the ring appears elsewhere, on screen. Pressing it is pressing the
  closed eye. (Leading candidate.)
• Or the non-perfect ring, hand-rolled in wax and cast — a different wax
  original per cast, every edition a different drawing of the same
  remembered image.
Either way: Ecoflex 00-30, a whisper of white pigment, clear window over
the lens, QR tile embedded in the base. And made to fit the camera of a
phone — a recess in the base that seats onto the camera bump, so the
object *settles* onto it. Self-aligning, that small tactile seat.

Later, on the tram, just my phone: maybe the object is optional. A
fingertip over the camera was enough — the finger IS the material,
translucent, blood-lit; covering the light with your own body is the
input. And the camera sees more than pressure: held still, the image
pulses with my heartbeat — blood volume in the fingertip modulating the
light, the same principle heart-rate apps use. Phosphenes ride on pulse;
the sensor can too. The ring could breathe with the visitor's actual
blood. No object, no edition, no silicone — skin.

Settles — keep the word. For how the object sits on the phone, and for how
pressure should arrive in the work: not a switch, a warmth.

————————————————————————————————

From discussion with Sharon:

• The universal-yet-private image. Physical touch. A biological thing.
• What's the input? Fidget toys...
• Think about display — what size screen? A projection? The floor? A live
  feed? Something local to interact with?
• "Touch screen" — video background vs black background. I like the black
  background idea.
• Static vs dynamic — I think dynamic adds to the interactivity, but I
  don't want to discard static: aesthetically that's something I'd like
  to explore.

Sharon requested I document iterations, and suggested my critiques on top
of artworks — that combines aesthetics + research + outcomes in one go.

this was a working session with claude

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer — Remote Pulse · Prisoner’s cinema · 8 artists using silicone (Artsy)