INTERACTIVE WORKS
INHABITANCE
Inhabitance is a Digital Interactive Installation exploring the ideas of presence, memory, and physicality. Random letters are strewn about the frame, controlled by a simple silhouette cast the participants in the space. As the letters are moved around the frame and manipulated using your “digital body”, the psychological boundary between the real and the virtual starts to melt away. While much of our everyday interactions with technology are handled through physical interfaces such as touchscreens, keyboards, mice, or otherwise, Inhabitance poses the physical body as the physical interface to interact with the virtual world.
Inhabitance’s interactive philosophy is one that breaks from the norm when considering other Digital Interactive Installations. Rather than having a foundation built on inaccessible philosophy or theory, Inhabitance is built on the universal concept of Play. As something that is coded into our very beings, Play represents a unique concept that is accessible to anyone that chooses to engage in it. Inhabitance takes advantage of that, and encourages participants to Play within the area of Inhabitance, to create their own philosophy and theory in regards to what it means to them. There is no wrong way to engage with Inhabitance.
Although it is singular in its installation, Inhabitance stands on the shoulders of a long process of evolving installations. Through each of the iterations, the idea of a “controllable silhouette” has evolved and developed into the fully interactive version that is present in the current version. Starting with a simple implementation of a silhouette to read text (specifically the entirety of the “Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus), it continued to evolve and develop through the usage of Arduino Sensor, Isadora Projection Designer, and (now) the Processing Language. Through all of the evolutions, the installation has come from reading text to creating text. Each experience with Inhabitance is a unique one, informed by participants’ own relationships with language.
Participants use language, hearing, movement and play in order to shape Inhabitance for those that come after, to engage in a form of communication via memory. Participants are influenced by those who came before, and will in turn shape it for the ones that come after; creating an unbroken chain of unique interactions that cannot exist without the influence of those within.
THE BOULDER, THE HERO, THE CAVE
A document of the progression leading up to some of the early tests of Inhabitance. The first iteration, titled “The Boulder” was a single-screen interactive Installation challenging viewers with the task of reading the entirety of Albert Camus’ “Myth Of Sisyphus”. The second iteration titled “The Hero” began use of Kinect V1 sensors, and challenged viewers with a similar, but watered down, task of putting together an excerpt from Hito Steyerl’s essay “A Thing Like You And Me”. The third iteration titled “The Cave” abandoned the linguistic aspects in lieu of an overhead camera that would track participants’ positions in the installation, and assign them a single note. Participants could control the Pitch and Amplitude of the note by moving around in the active area of the installation. The last section is a short demo of early tests (and some source code) of Inhabitance.
“The Boulder” was made possible by positioning a camera behind the viewer pointed at the projection screen, which would create a silhouette when participants moved in front of it. This video feed was sent to Isadora Projection Designer, run through layers of Image Processing, and put over a library of images containing excerpts from “The Myth of Sisyphus”. As viewers moved around the area to read the text, pressure sensors wired to an Arduino Uno would trigger and send a signal to Isadora, which would then shuffle which excerpt of the essay was being displayed on screen. This became a never-ending challenge of trying to read the essay while simultaneously trying to avoid triggering the shuffle order.
“The Hero” took these aspects from “The Boulder” and transformed them into something more focused on intentional control. A random set of words from one excerpt of “A Thing Like You And Me” would appear on screen, and participants would need to move around in the area to find them. Once they had been discovered, the pressure sensors were turned into buttons, allowing participants to clearly and intentionally continue to the next set of random words. This process repeated until participants were able to put together the entire excerpt.
“The Cave” (not shown) pivoted from the usage of text and language, and instead focused on experience and presence. Participants were given a clear and controllable proof of their presence in the installation, and nothing else. With no present objective in the installation, participants were allowed to interact with the space however they deemed fit. Some ran around, some stood still, and some moved slowly with others to “play” the installation as an instrument.
FABRICATED REALITY
Fabricated Reality is a Proof-Of-Concept Public Interactive Installation utilizing AR Technology that could be set up, exhibited, and torn down with little to no impact in any setting. This iteration of Fabricated Reality was purpose built to be displayed in the City Hall Courtyard in Philadelphia, PA. When the piece is loaded, four stories begin playing, each coming from a different direction (when using headphones). As participants approach a story, the narration gets louder, and they come upon a print of a 35mm photograph. When the camera views the print, a cinemagraph of the photo begins playing while participants listen to the rest of the story.
Fabricated Reality began as an idea for an installation that had no discernible “right way” to interact with it. Participants would be able to choose and tailor their own unique experience, pursuing and ignoring stories in any way they deemed fit. This installation was created in Unity using AR Foundation plugins, and compiled/uploaded using XCode. In total, this piece makes use of AR Technology, C# coding, After Effects animation, 35mm Analog Photography, and traditional darkroom developing/printing techniques.