This was our first-ever interactive landscape — our first sensory-tactile, light-and-sound instrument.

We built it in 2013, on a grant from the Moscow Ministry of Culture, somewhere in Leonozovsky Park (I don’t even remember exactly which one).

For us at the time, it was a brutally complex project.

Multi-level, multi-layered, full of engineering traps.

We brought several radio-electronics engineers into the team — students from some electronics-and-physics faculty — and we ourselves dove deep into electronics, programming, sensors, and the whole painful ecosystem of signals and glitches.

The installation was a multi-tiered podium with a forest of DIY acrylic tubes growing out of it.
A lot of tubes.
All reinforced so no one could snap them off.

The real innovation was the touch system.
Each tube was essentially a capacitive sensor: you touched it with your fingers or hands, and an internal metal mesh detected the change in the electromagnetic field.

Basically the same principle used in iPhone screens — except outside, in a park, in winter, in rain, in frost, and in Moscow.
We spent ages tuning it.
The sensors were moody, interfered with each other, caught noise from everything around them.

We had to filter, balance, equalize, and debug endlessly.
And because this was winter, we had to build heating systems for all the boards hidden under the podium so the electronics wouldn’t freeze to death.
The whole thing was a colossal effort.
And yes — it came out a bit crooked, a bit rough, not perfect at all.
But for 2013, it was a huge achievement for us.

We wrote a special sound design for the piece: each tube had its own sample, triggered on touch, and touching any tube affected the lighting patterns of all the others.

A simple principle with a very complicated anatomy — our first serious attempt to make a landscape that responds, sings, and glows when you touch it.