Overview

SCROLL DOWN

Overview

Watch Video[lightbox]

An expedition into the invisible aesthetics of electronics.

Papier Machine is a booklet gathering a family of 13 paper-made electronic toys ready to be cut, colored, folded, assembled or torn. Silkscreened with special inks that have different electric properties, these toys aim at revealing what hides behind our machines’ magic black boxes : a world of materials, shapes, colors, stories and even smell.

A Project by

Marion Pinaffo &
Raphaël Pluvinage

Video by

Clément Brandely

Video soundtrack by

Flavien Berger

Text

Léa Bardin & Juliette Pollet

"In the electronic tropics, paper mutates. On this printed land, we stride along the silkscreened silver paths and their networks of batteries and connected roots, we pick bunches of metamorphosis and plant a projection space where intuition leads the game. Rules are simple: developing spontaneous shapes, a free and fictional act, in order to set new linguistics between machine and paper."

Featured

SWITCH — A starving chameleon switch begs for some aluminum foil, for power to flow through. Creased into a ball and thrown: if the mouth is hit, the five black pupils will change their tones

GYROSCOPE — A marble takes you on a real fast ride. Gravity pushes down, so, pull up, forward, back, perpendicularly. When you manage to keep the proper angle, you realize that the track only gets tamed slowly. An eight-shaped spin. What a funny move. The rotation seems suspended in time forever.

PLAYING TRACK — Vertical path. Nose-diving through a serpentine corridor, strange whistling drowned in silver prints. Brief sounds oscillating between melodies and Morse code suddenly appear as speech petals, and disappear as evocations. Bursts waterfall. Before each turn: a message.

WRITING TRACK — Horizontal switch. Incantation moment. With a pencil, the score is drawn: each line is a note, superposing one after the other. They build a rhythm, they compose a voice. The field is mined all around. On the drawings’ edge, a musical scene wears a graphite shine. The circus resonates and then is shushed by a single rubber stroke.

SWITCH 2 — Silent ambush around the corner. Hurtling on the left of the wall, it’s a whistling tumble in a straight line; an obstacle changes the direction: bad bounce. Try again. Climb slowly, this time. Lucky ricochet. Victorious score.

TILT SWITCH — Geometry thinks of curious junctions. Shades flourish and join. New species emerge: each generation craves for vertexes, folds, peaks. Sometimes, an ordinary polyhedron challenges a parallelepipedon. Families come face to face as funambulists. A squeal, and everything is upside down.

HUMIDITY SENSOR — Hunting party with catlike stealth, a straw in the hand, papier-mâché bullets in the pocket. All of a sudden, a Cyclops eye. Immediate colored bombing head for vision’s red and blue sides. No spit should be random: the goal is to reveal what hides under the black dot eyes.

WIND SENSOR — Among the graphical thicket, two masked silhouettes slowly emerge. Figures rear up as paper-cut puppets, rising on their rods like alders coming out of the water. Air flows around their ghostly arms, while they raise their instruments to their lips and start blowing. Courting hoots concert for eardrums.

MASS SENSOR — A muddled puzzle swings in the wind. Dust dashes on the chessboard, then flirts around in every direction. Everything moves and sways, motors inspire tornados. Paper’s aerial density sets of a supercharged duel.

POWER REVERSER — Enchantment in the air. On the side, a proud face. Copper creepers leap into the void. First signs of a thrill, you’re green and you see red. Dreams of weightlessness, blues in the heights.

PHOTORESISTOR — Light and shadows provoke a whole lot of gesticulations. An ebullient and impulsive flock bounces at full speed on the ground’s unpredictable bumps. Complicated catch. The winged creatures flee at the first photon change.

COLOR SENSOR — Fairies tournament. Gleams couple with printed colors. Loads of fleas with dazzling and shivering reflexes. Phosphorescence arises in the twilight. Under the beacon’s light, a red wand awakes a red grain; the same goes for blue, and red. A primary ballet.

About us

Marion Pinaffo & Raphaël Pluvinage

Both trained as designers, Marion Pinaffo and Raphaël Pluvinage create experiences and interactions dealing with the "assumed” complex phenomena of our world. With their project, Papier Machine, they are laureate of the cultural programme Audi talents awards, 2016, and have been supported by the residency Program Te Ataata in New Zealand.

Marion Pinaffo

Born in Tarn (France) in 1987, Marion graduated from Ensci - Les Ateliers as designer and l’Ensaama Oliver de Serres in metal craftmanship. Since then she invents graphic systems that the public can play with. Whatever the scale or the material, from spaces to object, she engages the public into experiences both intuitive and singular, bringing joys and enthusiasm.

She worked for the design studio Doshi Levien in London, and collaborates often with the french illustrator Benoît Bonnemaison-Fitte and the graphic/illustration studio Forme Vives. She has been commissioned by several cultural institution such as Centre Pompidou and La Villette in Paris, or Biennale du design in Saint Etienne.

@marionpinaffo on instagram
Marion Pinaffo's website

Raphaël Pluvinage

Born in Montpellier (France) in 1986, Raphaël graduated from Ensci - Les Ateliers and the University of Technogy Compiègne. Whether an object, a game, an installation or a film, Raphaël’s projects all stem from a world where technology is turned on its head. He creates a world where pleasure, play and experience become differents tools to critically engage the audience and shift their understanding of their own relationship with technology.

He was commissioned by the Gaité Lyrique and Biennale Internationale de Design de Saint-Etienne, and his work can be seen in the permanent collection of the French FNAC (Fonds National d’Art Contemporain) and has been exhibited internationally. Apart his personal work, Raphaël worked with London-based speculative and interactive design studio Superflux, and co-funded Smiirl, an Internet of Things start-up, as lead designer.

@raphael_pluvinage on instagram
Raphaël Pluvinage's website

short circuit

SHort circuit

Written by Juliette Pollet.

"Knowing the images that surround us also means broadening the contact possibilities with reality, seeing, and understanding more."
— Bruno Munari¹

We start this exploration by diving into a world that is both familiar and mysterious: the microcosmos enclosed within our everyday electronic devices. Looked at closely, printed circuit cards become cityscapes, and our phones’ components resemble little creatures. Papier Machine (Paper Machine) invites us to meet with these ghosts in the shell.

1. Quote from “Ognuno vede ciò che sa” [“Everyone sees what he knows”] in Bruno Munari, Design e comunicazione visiva. Contributo a una metodologia didattica [Design and Visual Communication. Contributions to a Teaching Method], Ed. Laterza, Roma-Bari, 1968.

The electronic mechanisms that we constantly interact with keep escaping us; they’re supposedly invisible, intangible, and impossible to understand. Who knows that we have gyroscopes in our phones? Who knows these devices make our screens automatically rotate from a portrait to a landscape orientation? Marion Pinaffo and Raphaël Pluvinage’s project aims to deconstruct these black boxes that we manipulate everyday without knowing how they work. To paraphrase and contradict of one of Clarke’s laws² , Papier Machine provides us with tools that help us tell technology apart from magic, by revealing its materiality and its principles. A joyful demystification adventure that makes the world slightly more intelligible.

2.The science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote in his essay Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination (1973): “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

This research produced two sets of functioning prototypes. The first is a booklet that gathers 13 self-assembly paper games; the second is a set of 4 posters, forming together a space to activate. In other terms, a collection of silk-screened gadgets and a 2D amusement arcade. For although the project is meant to be didactic, Papier Machine doesn’t impose any specific protocol, but only games and toys that one should experiment with. Scratching a surface with a graphite pencil, throwing papier-mâché projectiles, making confetti piles: through these rudimentary and iterative interaction modes, the user gets acquainted with electronic principles. These are exercises that invite us to put things into practice. The goal is not to develop a DIY phone, but “that one acquires experimentally what is the specialist’s prerogative”, a comment borrowed from Enzo Mari describing his manifesto project Autoprogettazione³ .

3. Quote from “A critical-ideological debate between E. Mari and E. Facchinelli,” in Enzo Mari, Autoprogettazione, Edizioni Corraini, Mantoue, 2012, (1st Italian edition, 1974), p. 45. In 1974, with Autoprogettazione, the Italian designer offered as described in a subtitle to the eponymous book, “[a] project for making easy-to-assemble furniture using rough boards and nails. An elementary technique to teach anyone to look at present production with a critical eye.”

The educational intention takes shape in an economy of means and shapes, whose simplicity is a playful challenge in itself. As pointed out in its title, Papier Machine is mainly made of paper, a familiar material that one isn’t afraid to mess up with. Paper is layered, creased, folded, bent, cut, fragmented, frayed, flattened, hung on walls, assembled into volumes: these simple actions enable super low-tech though interactive experiences. Colored and/or reactive printed inks (the silver ink is power conductive, others are thermosensitive) bring the pages to life. A kit of components is provided to activate the result, including, for instance, batteries as well as propellers. Each toy offers MacGyver-like challenges: producing a sequencer only with a pencil and a battery, building a sort of primitive pinball machine in no time at all, or putting together a folded paper hovercraft. However, instructions are deliberately laconic, and the results are always uncertain. Anyone is free to interpret the manual in his or her own way, but also to decide of his or her own commitment level, and to rephrase, if needed, their intuitive understanding of whatever mechanism.

Nothing is given to the user straight away, except for shapes and colors, themselves meant to be misleading to the eye and the mind. Far from restraining themselves to the expectation of a scientific protocol leading to specific results, the games are experiences rich in signs and in chance discoveries. The designers took advantage of the decorative potential of printing techniques often restricted to an exclusively functional use. At first glance, some of the pages covered with labyrinths, moiré patterns, and mosaics seem to belong to the Grammar of Ornament. Only a closer look reveals the conductive lines. Raster graphics, a usually imperceptible pattern made to be seen from afar, for posters for instance, become sign “texturizers,” once again in Bruno Munari’s words³.

4 Bruno Munari, op. cit.

Papier Machine’s silver circuits and toggle switches thus stand far away from their conventional industrial referents. Our eyes wander around the colorful labyrinths, and our minds drift towards handball fields, racetracks, and paper architectures.