Never mind the ghastly passport mugshots, everyone knows the real purpose of shopping centre photo booths is cramming your mates into for a face-pulling competition. They do lack a little room for manoeuvre though, which is where the Thermobooth from taliaYstudio and multimedia artist Jonas Bohatsch comes in.
Combining the space and flexibility of a studio setting with the silliness of a booth, this high-tech innovation uses rather pretty Osram OLED-mirrors for a flash mechanism and a tricksy new shutter trigger to take a shot whenever the subjects touch each other. This gives a dynamic picture capturing a more “real” interaction, and puts all the control in the hands, noses and lips of the subjects. The Therm in Thermobooth comes from the output method – instead of waiting around for a strip of glossy pictures, what pops out in double quick time is a low-res, thermally-printed image on paper. The project is up and running at Vienna Design Week and concept co-creator Talia Radford reports a lot of contact…
