Surface Traversal pushes the plane of the 2-dimensional touch screen interface into 3-dimensional emergent behaviors. Participants are presented with a wall-mounted touch screen and provoked to interact with it. The words “touch me” are displayed until contact is detected. Typically, touching art is a frowned upon practice; I wanted to continue tweaking the user-viewer role in the strict gallery convention. Additionally, technology has been critiqued as lacking a human accessibility. Surface Traversal attempts to dissuade the assumptions of art and technology by suggestively inviting physicality with the art and with the technology.
Surface Traversal is written in Objective-C with OpenGL. Flocking algorithms were modified from the book, The Computational Beauty of Nature.