Noli Me Tangere is a 128 year-old novel that sparked the Philippine revolution against Spain. It is one of the most important works of Philippine literature, but it is rarely read outside school. To bring it to a younger audience, an audiobook application was developed. Because the novel’s title is Latin for “touch me not,” we created portraits that were designed to be touched.

We commissioned portraits of iconic characters from Noli Me Tangere. We painted them on wooden panels using conductive ink. The ink strokes were connected to a circuit board at the back of each panel. Human touch closed and activated the circuits to play clips of dialogue. We mounted the portraits in exhibits in leading bookshops and museums over several weeks, where thousands of people were able to interact directly with the panels.

We generated both onsite and online attention, with an estimated 3.5 million impressions from Twitter alone. The exhibit was able to drive awareness for the audiobook, with the number of searches peaking during actual exhibit hours. Seven percent of the thousands who attended the exhibit downloaded the app afterwards.