Project Director: Pia Ednie-Brown
Project Managers: Boo Chapple and Inger Mewburn
Photographs: Sophie Kahn and Inger Mewburn

Skins of Intimate Distance was a collaborative research project involving architects designers and installation artists that took place in Melbourne in November 2003. Its objective was to investigate liveness, affect and the residues of bodyness in networked communication, interactive media and augmented architectural surfaces.

Skins housed four digital interactive art works: The Nearness of You (Ronald Aveling and Roberto Salvatore), Phantom Fingers (Tim Schork and Jan-Oliver Kunze), Close For Comfort (Boo Chapple) and Responsive Wall ( Inger Mewburn and Nigel Stewart).

The skin itself was developed by Pia Ednie-Brown. It is made of sheets of latex cast on a mould of skin texture and stretched on a modular aluminim frame supplied by AME Systems.

The Skins project took about four months from planning to implementation and was achieved on a cash budget of $2000 AUS dollars supplied by RMIT Union Arts. We were also lucky enough to recieve $2000 dollars worth of latex sponsorship and the structure in-kind. As well as the physical installation site Skins of Intimate Distance involved an online component, comprised of Moveable Type blogs about the research process of each interactive work and a live presence field which was designed to monitor the intensity of audience interaction with the physical site online.