ActionPainter
A phone becomes a loaded brush. Fling it, and paint flies across a wall-sized canvas.
I — The workConcept
ActionPainter offers an expressive, bodily experience that works the arm and stirs the soul. Visitors use their own phones as brushes: a flick of the wrist throws paint across a projected canvas, and the force, angle and rhythm of the gesture shape every splash.
As in action painting, the heart of the matter is the act itself. The combination of technology and physical action turns the phone — the device that usually keeps us still and staring — into a tool of personal expression, a live brush and an extension of the body.
II — DocumentationPlates
III — The storyMaking & meaning
The reference is Jackson Pollock and the tradition of action painting, in which the canvas becomes an arena and the picture a record of movement. We asked what that tradition might mean when everyone already carries an accelerometer in their pocket.
Commissioned by Google Israel for Fresh Paint Art Fair, the work travelled to Google Zeitgeist in London and to Google in New York and Korea. Among the people who flung paint at it was the then-President of Israel, Shimon Peres.
But we always felt the digital canvas was a sketch for something wetter. We built a prototype Physical ActionPainter that throws real paint in response to a phone's gesture — coming full circle, back to the drip.