Category: Digital / Performance

I Want My Kiss Back is a silent movie that shows a day in the life of a man who lives in a society where data can be transferred by touch. People touch for triggering financial transactions which are controlled by their wearable devices.

The movie depicts the disappearance of the technological interface and declares the human body as a vehicle of information, a wire through which a valuable – namely money – can flow.

The touch-action-instances are the ones that will develop the story. During the day the man realises that touch and human contact have gone through a transformation and their values have been corrupted.

I Want My Kiss Back nostalgically confronts the idea of touch becoming completely functional with the warmth and mystery of human touch and its natural effects.

Video 8:04 min

Concept, Direction: Valerie Bugmann
Technical Development: Valerie Bugmann, Dylan Tinlun Chan
Actors: Héctor Mora, Alexandra Hedberg, Petr Bocharnikov, Sue Huang, Gabor Papp.
Camera: Valerie Bugmann, Héctor Mora.
Editing: Valerie Bugmann
2005

Digitalized at your Service is an interactive performance in which a group of messengers dressed in provocative red uniforms offer the service of transmitting confidential messages between the spectators in an unconventional manner; through touch.

The use of wearable electronic devices and the body’s capacitance, enables spectators to write their messages by tapping in Morse Code onto the messenger’s skin. The messages travel as electrical pulses through the unassuming, unaffected and unsuspecting body of the messenger which then brings the encoded message to its recipient among the spectators.

We witness a bizarre semantic experiment around the notion of touch and communication: a scene of people touching in unusual ways, fingers tapping a perishing Morse Code language, the reconfiguration of the conventions of touch… The performance engages spectators in the political discreetness of a disappearing interface, and the chemical, electrical, perceptual and cultural encodings that happen in the in-between.

Digitalized at your Service was funded by Sitemapping Switzerland in 2006, It was presented at the Digital Artweeks in Zürich in 2007 and at the Picnic Festival in Amsterdam 2007.

This project started in 2002 out of the curiosity to experiment with emerging technologies that engage or immerse the human body into a network of data exchange. The awkward idea of having data flow through my body and the claim that these technologies proposed more human ways of communicating and transmitting data, inspired me to develop this touch based communication technology in order to explore its impact on our conception of touch and communication.

Concept: Valerie Bugmann. 
Technical Development: Valerie Bugmann, Dylan Chan Tinlun. 
Performers: Simona Hofmann, Nadine Tobler, Martina Richter, Sara Bugmann, Jonas Gillmann.
Costume Design: Alexandra Bugmann.
Documentation: Andi Hofmann, Remo Hexpoor.