Hipdisk – the world’s most undignified musical instrument
The hipDisk was conceived and developed during Craft Australia’s three-week summer residential lab focused on wearable technology. The idea is that the hipDisk is meant to be a “a wearable interface that extends and augments the moving body with musical capabilities.”
Switches are strategically placed around the perimeter of each disk – these switches connect when the two disks touch, playing a sound. This allows the wearer to play a chromatic scale and simple melodies, restricted only by flexibility and speed of their “dance”.
Danielle Wilde, the hipDisk’s creator says:
“hipDisk is designed to inspire people to swing their hips and explore and extend the full range of movement available to them through a simultaneous, interdependent exploration of sound. In creating hipDisk, the interest was to move beyond limb- and digit-triggered switches and explore full-body movement for actuation. The resulting body-instrument interconnects choreography and composition in a fundamental way, and hopefully opens up new areas of exploration.”
Here it is in action:
If you can beleive it, a number of hipDisk players have gotten together to form the hipDiskettes, who are working on a performance of “The Girl From Ipanema”.
“Four hipDisked performers can play chord structures, harmonize, provide counterpoint, so develop increasingly complex hipDisk compositions.”
I’m just not sure what to think of this thing. Combined with their outfits, this has a ridiculousness factor almost on par with the Star Wars kid.
You can read up more on the hipDisk in the PDF document.
