Created by Marion Pinaffo & Raphaël Pluviange, ‘Papier Machine’ is a booklet gathering a family of 13 paper-made electronic toys ready to be cut, coloured, folded, assembled or torn. Screen-printed with special inks that have different electric properties, these toys aim to reveal what hides behind our machines’ magic black boxes : a world of materials, shapes, colors, stories and even smell.

“We start this exploration by diving into a world that is both familiar and mysterious: the microcosmos enclosed within our everyday electronic devices. Looked at closely, printed circuit cards become cityscapes, and our phones’ components resemble little creatures. Papier Machine (Paper Machine) invites us to meet with these ghosts in the shell.

In the electronic tropics, paper mutates. On this printed land, we stride along the silkscreened silver paths and their networks of batteries and connected roots, we pick bunches of metamorphosis and plant a projection space where intuition leads the game. Rules are simple: developing spontaneous shapes, a free and fictional act, in order to set new linguistics between machine and paper.” – Marion Pinaffo & Raphaël Pluviange

All toys work with the principle of shortcutting a circuit, but demonstrates a different sensor principle (gyroscope, humidity sensor, tilt switch, wind sensor, etc…). The toys are silkscreened on paper with inks that have different electric properties. They used silver base conductive ink (highly conductive, for making circuit path, some sensor, capacitor), carbon conductive ink (for making resistor), thermochromatic ink (which disappear when underneath circuit get hot) and “Classic” silkscreened. Also a bunch of other basic electronic parts not made out of paper were used, that needed to be added by the user including a coin and 9V battery cell, piezzo, ne555,(attiny85 arduino for the prototyping) motor, graphite pencil, z-axis conductive tape.

Project Page | Marion Pinaffo | Raphaël Pluvinage