chair de poule

Brad Todd

chair de poule ("goosebumps" English) is a telerobotic work which incorporates a book interface covered with a grid of pins to trap dust (13 years...) and provide a surface for sonic manipulation. The book is played by dragging a tiny microphone attached to a lock of my deceased father's hair through the pins and dust. The hair is close mic'd at the point of contact and generates a minimalist soundscape which is created by manipulating a small robotic mechanism from the website interface. The video image is a live feed of the book/pin/dust/hair construction and the interaction takes place in real time.

Brad Todd lives in Montréal, Canada. He completed a M.F.A. from Concordia University in Montréal in 1993. Todd is an instructor in the Digital Fine Arts program at Concordia University where he teaches studio based courses. His area of interest in the arts is in using digital technologies to animate physical objects and tableaus on the Net and in actual environments. Todd has been making Net based projects since 1997, which incorporated more traditional forms of technology driven media such as video, audio and animation and now makes Telerobotic works which are experienced and manipulated via the Web. Recent exhibitions of Web based projects include: FILE (Brasil, 2001), The New Museum of Contemporary Art (N.Y.C., 2001), ISEA 2002 (Nagoya, Japan), Musée du Québec (Québec, 2002), and Viper (Basel, Switzerland, 2002).
Todd is also a co-founder of the on-line digital arts journal MobileGaze.

http://www.mobilegaze.com/zero