lyt_A is an artwork, an instrument and a translation medium in one. It is a flexible structure that can transmit haptic information on a distance: when the structure is touched on one site, the touch will be visible and touchable on another. The installation consists of two identical but mirrored wall-like structures, that can transmit the sensation of touch (shape deformation) on a distance. Placing the two structures in distant locations (about 100 metres apart) will encourage the visitors to play with each other by manipulating the structures with their hands and bodies, and learning about each-other's shapes through touch. 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.

Experientially, the installation can be experienced as:

• Connective sculpture linking two locations through touch (and thereby providing a feeling of shrinking the distance)

• Animatronic entity (or two to be precise), with a particular character and physical presence provided by its physical and computational mechanisms

• One interesting tension is that the intimacy of movement-in-contact is used to bridge anonymously remote locations.

• Sensory transmitter of kinaesthetic experience.
• Telematic force-feedback array.
• Analyzer and synthesizer of movement, pressure, with a certain spatial and temporal resolution.
• (In principle, of other aspects of touch as well, which we will not have the chance to implement.)

• “Smooth” (i.e. compare “decoy” project: continuous non-smooth surface).
• Animated membrane.
• Responsive to pressure and warmth

• Something that feels alive.
• Section of the animal onto whose skin we have a window.
• Underneath: muscle, structure, flab.

Theoretically we are researching:

• What intent or information is preserved?
• What is deformed during the course of transmission?
• what parameters and what resolution do we need to perceive someone's touch?

• Might we begin over time to sense the other inserted between ourselves and those to whom we are connected, asserting itself in our sensory interface?

• A topological connection exceeding familiar causality.