« Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness » is a sentence from Samuel Beckett but also the title of Eugenio Ampudia’s last artwork created and installed with the support of Ultra-lab  and running on Arduino Mega and GSM Shield:

The exhibition room has in its center a rectangular mirror made of water that reflects the room and the visitors. The perfect still water, metaphor of silence, is broken by the irruption of sporadic waves. These movements, the stain on silence, are provoked by the visitors’ interactions. In the heart of the water tank, a dispositive is able to receive calls and to open a valve. To each visitor’s call, so a series of movements is generated and break the calm.

Ultra-lab realized the technical part of the artwork thanks to an Arduino Mega, the Arduino GSM shield and various valves open and close by the Arduino Mega when a call is received by the shield. The dispositive is particularly interesting for its adaptation in a water context and for connecting valves.

Thanks to it, the artwork succeed to express beautifully the paradox between a destructive attraction for words and communication to which it’s hard to resist in order to prefer a finally inaccessible contemplation.

The work can be visited in the exhibition room Abierto X Obras in in the Spanish art center Matadero Madrid until the 17th of May 2015 and below you can watch a video interview with the artist:

The Open Source Hardware, Electronics and Robotics Convention is a 3-day event organized by the Synusia collective. The aim of the Convention is to extend the Open Source Software and to promote electronics and the philosophy of “do it yourself”. The event will take place in Madrid at the Centro de Formación Padre Piquer,  from the 21 to 23 September 2012. During the Convention, visitors will be able to attend and participate in lectures, workshops, round table discussions, and exhibitions of personal projects. The Convention is currently seeking submissions for papers and talks. Deadline for papers: 23 of July.

For more information: http://oshwcon.org/en