STEIM's Mobile Touch exhibition is an interactive electronic musical instruments exhibition and currently consists of 11 instruments created at STEIM. The exhibition is a portable version of STEIM's Touch exhibition which originated in 1998. The reason to create a mobile version was to be able to bring the exhibition to other locations. Since its incarnation in 2004, Mobile Touch has been presented in South Africa, Croatia, France, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium and Austria with over tens of thousands of visitor, from age 7 to 77.
The idea of these exhibition instruments is that the visitor is allowed to touch the objects to create and manipulate electronic sounds. Although that may seem obvious, it is not so long ago (the 70's and 80's) that you needed a computer keyboard to program most electronic instruments. In the 50's and 60's you had to even connect cables and turn knobs to operate them and you could change only one variable at a time. Those instruments weren't really designed as musical instruments. They were pieces of scientific apparatus, and were more for experimenting with sound than for making music. Nowadays electronics have become much cheaper and smaller, and everyone can build their own musical performance instruments.
The inventors (composers, musicians, theatre producers, artists etc.) think up exactly what they please - no instrument is too crazy or too personal to make. The instruments no longer have to please the dull and safe taste of an impersonal mass audience - most of whom in any case prefer to keep things exactly as they are. So the new instruments give free rein to the imagination. This is as true for the artists who design them as for the people who play them. Amongst the instruments are the world-famous Crackleboxes, the Finger Web, the HeadBanger, the Sound Portraits and the Sound Scratcher.
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