This amazing machine translates your tattoos into music

The year is 2100: You’re talking with your friend and when you show them a new tattoo, they ask, “Oh, what does it sound like?”

Tattoos are a heavily visual art; this much is true whether or not you have a music note behind your ear or have a full back tribute to Harry Potter. But musician and media artist Dmitri Morozov has created a device that takes tattoo designs off the skin by reading and translating them into electronic sounds.

Morozov’s project, titled “Reading My Body,” is one of a series of installations he’s done exploring the relationship between the self and the environment, but the only one that so directly relates to a person — Morozov designed and then got a tattoo just to test the machine.

::vtol:: “reading my body” from ::vtol:: on Vimeo.

Sure, it sounds more like a Radiohead B-side than anything you’d immediately recognize as music, but considering Morozov created this machine from, among other things, a Nintendo Wii remote, it shows a really interesting artistic/technologic fusion for the future. Musicians are already utilizing motion with tools like the Mi.Mu glove, so who knows what else the future of innovative creativity holds?

(Image via.)