New Sensual Interfaces uses linseeds to simulate “smart dust,” an imagined computing material made of tiny, communicating particles. Performed by Kenichi Okada, gestures of dividing, sharing, scattering and gathering the linseeds become speculative ways of handling information.

In the audio guide for MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind, Anthony Dunne describes the project as an exploration of how nanotechnology could change our interactions with the physical world. His reading draws attention to the poetic quality of the gestures: their precise functions remain unfamiliar, but they suggest another way of living with technology. Handling the linseeds makes an abstract proposition accessible through bodily movement.

Writing in the exhibition catalogue, Paola Antonelli places the project within an emerging shift from shaping existing materials toward generating objects through computational design and nanotechnology. The film gives this possibility an everyday setting, inviting viewers to imagine materials that could assemble, separate and take on different roles.

Together, these perspectives bring the project’s question into focus: how might changing the material of computing change our habits? Information becomes something to hold, divide or pass between people, opening questions about what we keep, share and discard, and which technological futures we might want to inhabit.

Interview with Anthony Dunne [1:43min]