Esteban de la Torre: “All objects will be able to keep and hold the information data, to have a memory, to be able to predict the future”
EJTech is Esteban de la Torre and Judit Eszter Karpati, an experimental art&tech design lab from Budapest. They focus on the synergy between the digital and physical worlds with a particular emphasis on HCI (Human-Computer-Interaction). We talked to Esteban about the future of technology and human interactions while EJTech was at an artistic residency at Milano’s Makerspace WeMake.
How do you imagine the future of the material world? Will it be interactive? Please, give some examples.
I think in many ways it’s already very interactive, if you hold your hand against the surface which is warm enough it will get warm. Just I think it’s gonna become augmented interactivity when it’s not only going to be interactive in one way, it’s going to be interactive in an unexpected way. Same as when you can map values into one thing and then you can map values into other things. That’s what gonna change. Now we are so used to the fact that when we put our hand on a glass and it becomes warm, when we take it away it becomes cold again, soon this warmth is going to be mapped to billion of other things.
I think it will become more interactive in the same way it becomes, I dare to say, “smart”. All objects will be able to keep and hold the information data, to have a memory, to be able to predict the future.
Much of our work is not a product. We are constantly asked why we don’t sell it as a product, why we don’t do a product. One example is a rug with sensors. When you stroke this sensor, it produces a clap sound, so it looks like a rug and it triggers different clap sounds.
Thinking about specifically that example, you can make a rug that helps you to know exactly where your kid is walking without looking, just hearing it according to the harmonics of where the rug tile is. Maybe a child could interact with the carpet and realize that sounds depends on where she goes. I think the future is in this feedback thing, not about making things interactive, but making them be interactive back towards the user.
What have you learned about education while doing EJtech workshops and residencies?
People are very intimidated when it comes to technology, but they are not intimidated anymore by touching experiences like smartphones. Now when people come across different cables and wiring something together they are always afraid of getting electrocuted, they are just constantly afraid of that, plugs, wires, even if wires are plugged to a computer, they don’t understand many of this basic principles. That’s all right, they don’t have to know all these things. But they feel intimidated by the whole esthetics.
Which skills will be in demand in the future?
I think it’s very important to think outside the box, yes sounds cliché, to continue exploring not only yourself but everything around. We all have this routine: wake up, brush your teeth, walk… But the moment when you experiment with that routine, like brushing your teeth after you drink your apple juice, maybe that’s not gonna be pleasant, but you learn something else about your environment, you realize something new. I think this experimenting and getting sometimes a little shock of wiring something the wrong way this is the way to learn and understand more about the world around you.
Most probably gardening and farming would be the most valuable skill one future self could develop. And yes, it would definitely come handy if dystopian food shortages flood this third rock from the sun… But I’m not so apocalyptic.
And although auto sustainable inner city diets would be awesome, were you freshly grow what you freshly eat or some variation of this, but the fact why I think gardening or farming is the skill set to develop in the future is mostly because probably the neural paths that form in your brain after learning and mostly acknowledging that LIFE is something that most people regard as a disposable (Christmas) decoration, help you grasp how ALIVE is the world we live in and our reality. We sort of grow to believe that only something that can smile can be happy, hence you need a mouth to experience happiness. (Yes, we anthropomorphize reality in order to understand it. “How smart is mother nature…”)
How do you imagine the future of the tech industry with all these new tools that make music production easier?
I think technology will become less intrusive. In the future, wearable technology and research on textiles will expand more. Now it’s a primitive mixture between both of them. The textile is soft, the electronics are still not. In the future everything will be computed inside textiles, textiles will be computing information. There will be no need for cables. Yes, It would become much less intrusive and can merge with other technology. Anyway, I see a bright future of humankind even with all these doomsday-type paranoia, I think technology is on our side. And I guess singularity is really near.
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