Transient Mobile

Cecchi de Rossi is unveiling in Paris ‘Transient Mobile’, a portable bone conduction device designed by Stefano De Ponti in collaboration with Cecchi de Rossi, Gioele Villani and Emanuele Magni.

In a present characterized by a serial accumulation of content that triggers frenetic, partial and distracted consumption dynamics, what modes of use could encourage careful, intentional and deep engagement?

The Transient Mobile is a portable, monophonic listening device for ephemeral compositions, designed to be produced as a limited-run multiple. A simple pressure is enough to activate a sound flow that, through a bone diffuser, propagates in the user's body, exploiting the conduction and resonance properties of the skeletal system.

The simplest action suggested is to exert pressure with an elbow on the sensitive surface. By maintaining this pressure, you will be able to hear sounds from the palm of your hand on which the chosen ear for listening rests. But the device lends itself to being discovered and used in personal ways.

The ease of transport, combined with the presence of a rechargeable battery, emphasize and promote the importance of dialogue with the surrounding sound world. Of the content, made in a single copy and deliberately abandoned in the internal circuit in order to make any type of extractive intervention bankrupt, the duration is not known. No additional output or adjustments and no possibility to move temporally in the playback of the track, which will stop at the release ready to randomly restart from another point to the next contact, thus making the melodic sequence unpredictable and different with each restart. The connection between the user, the author and the environment is fully fulfilled, since everything takes place in an unrepeatable present, where the mode and choice of the place of listening intervene dynamically on the enjoyment, stimulating a totalizing immersive experience.

Listening is therefore extremely subjective, exclusive and qualitatively different for each, modified by individual physical peculiarities. In this sense we could consider the Transient Mobile a testimonial work, not verifiable, shareable in the form of a story by the one who used it, to whom we must grant our trust.

Stefano De Ponti is a sound organizer, an intermedia artist and an art teacher born in Milan and living in Tuscany.