Electric Objects 2.0

The Internet is a social space, defined by nothing if not the connections between the people that use it. Art is a social phenomenon, informed deeply if not wholly by the relationship between the artist and the world, and the other people that fill it. Electric Objects exists at the intersection of these two systems of communication, and seeks to bring to the walls of our homes a new space for expression.

There is a tendency to think of Electric Objects as a hardware company — and it’s of course true in a way: we manufacture products and sell them to people. But hardware design and development is only a small slice of what we spend our time thinking about and working on.

Electric Objects is a platform for digital art, one that brings together the worlds of software, hardware, and art to inform an experience that we believe will change the way we think about computing and art and our homes.

Today we’re releasing Electric Objects 2.0, the first major update to our iOS and Android applications. This release includes a ton of speed and design improvements (load times are about 5x faster), but the biggest and most important change is that you can now follow other people in the Electric Objects community, and see the art that they’re displaying in their homes right now.

Today, thousands of people will walk into their living room, their bedroom or their office and see EO1 hanging on the wall. On the other side of the EO1 display is a community of thousands of others, made visible through the Electric Objects apps. Each participant in the community brings something to the table — the art they make, their taste in the work of others, a sense of humor, a bridge to events happening in real time.

But as communities grow, it’s natural for people to break off into smaller groups, to find common ground based on taste or interest. With this release, we wanted to enable our community to create for themselves a better version of Electric Objects based on their relationships.

Electric Objects 2.0 provides a glimpse into an important part of the Electric Objects vision: that the art we make and celebrate lives in a connected world, and is best discovered and understood through our relationships with other people.

We hope you enjoy it, and look forward to your feedback!

p.s. We’ve collected feedback from hundreds of you over the course of the last few months, and we have some more major improvements coming soon, so stay tuned!