Happy with how this prototype is coming along. My idea is to have many, many, many replicas of my grandfather's head in these house-like structures (only the nose visible from the side) filling a room. The tubes have solenoids that tap on the head in morse code, reading my most recent emails and passing them along. It's been nice figuring out the tech on these in a way that the components are all minimal and small: the whole thing is built with custom shift register shields attached to custom mosfet arrays, all operated from some code on a raspberry pi zero.
I like the idea, too, that the tapping is almost like a measurement device for memories of a person that is no longer here. Sort of like shouting into caverns, or something like that. When you think about it, conversation with words is just tapping the inside of someone's ear with a soundwave and gauging their response.