lyesbelhocine /courses /210

Lyes' bio
Curriculum Vitae(PDF)
Artist Statement & Contextual Statement

Description of concept

Today, in most of post industrial societies, service industry took over the economy. Some of its components include news media, advertisement business, and cultural production. This way, each and everyone can everyday witness manifestations of these, but their number increased in the last decades and is still growing now that Internet takes part of the game.

“Surrounded” is an interactive installation that addresses this issue. In a fairly large space, interactors are bounded by walls that will actually be screens and there will be a surround sound system. As people move in the space, videos are randomly triggered on each wall when they walk around. Sound will follow the image’s position. In the center of the installation, a circle will be lighted. When one comes inside the circle, the images shut down and he sound gets quiet: then, a peaceful moment is offered to the audience. “You still have a choice, take a minute to breath!” is the message I would like to deliver.

Design Elements

The main challenge for “Surrounded” will be to address a message to multiple people at the same time.
In interactive installations, it is very common to find that the interface(s) determine a maximum number of interactors. In “Surrounded”, people will come in an out whenever they want and will choose for how long they want to live the experience. As for the message, I rarely had the chance to witness an installation with a message. Most of them where aesthetic exploration, abstract concepts and representations or purely entertainment installation (except in museum where interactive objects/gadgets are used for educational purposes).
Thus, it will be a semi-open-scenario installation where a main cycle gets to be repeated and different sets of variations programmed in order to surprise people that want to experience it more than one time and those who heard of it from others. To avoid the redundancy of content, the latter should be as diversified as possible. A large part of random rule will be integrated in the code in order to allow that effect.

Some work that inspired me is actually at the opposite of my proposal: I have seen in the last months a lot of different examples of “New media commercials”. The same technologies are used to serve the purpose of bombarding us with images, news and commercials. It can be seen in malls to promote products, on streets, in subway stations, etc. All these spaces are public and therefore face the challenge of catching people’s attention.
“Surrounded” will probably be exhibited in a gallery or a dedicated space where anybody that will come will be there for the exhibition and will at least give it a try. Hence, people’s participation/attention is something I don’t have to worry about. However, trying to insure they attend at least one cycle will be another challenge. Also, the installation I intend to realise will be more immersive than the works described above.

Key features and main scenario

“Surrounded” will be an audiovisual interactive installation. That said, it will obviously contain video, sound and sensors.
Before one walks in, nothing is displayed on the screen walls. As soon as somebody enters, image is displayed to on the closest screen wall and sound to the speaker assigned to this wall. If another person comes in, the image will go from the first wall to the second and sound will be playing in the closest speaker to the second wall too. In the same way, image will keep moving from a wall to an other for a certain amount of time (that will be determined by user tests), a zone in the center of the space lights on while the screens get darker: the first person to get inside the zone will trigger the “peace bubble” that can have multiple forms (beach landscape, zen garden, family fun, mountain landscape, etc.) and extra spatial sound. After a rather short peaceful moment, noise invades screens and speakers and screens continue displaying images until the system either reaches another cycle because there still is people in, or goes back to standby mode.

This description is just the first sketch of the project. As I realized recently that for the first time, I would care about content, I put less effort on the interactivity. One of my first goals will be to find a good idea to boost the interactivity level of this installation.

Cluster's Q&A

Before I pitched the project I had in mind, we first talked about the fact I couldn't find an idea because I usually think first of what technology I want to use and content afterward. For the first time, I felt like thinking about the content first. So Topher asked me what I liked when I saw other exhibitions and I answered that I often feel like it's below what I expect. So they asked me:

• Content : why not use the gap between what you expect from new media and what is actually done for creating a project ?

First, I don't think I have enough experience as an interactor/witness to allow myself to critique what is done. It might be misinterpreted and I think it would a hard and dangerous work. Second, I often come across pieces that only people in our field can understand. "From our community to our community"-like pieces are not something I aspire to do as a creator. The question of whether to create art for oneself (self expression) or for others (audience oriented) is an endless debate towards which I have no cut-and-dried position. I personally have always worked within teams anyways and I am used to design stuff where I obviously have a part of me, but minimal. Also, I don't think the content is the only way to express oneself. Programming, the choice of technologies, the interior design are also part of self expression.

• You have a very limited level of Interaction, how are you going to determine when the content needs to change to the peaceful element?

It is an issue that I will think about later. What I can see from now is either a timer that would be triggered when one begins to interact with the system, or the amount of movement in the space. The latter can be calculated if I have infrared webcams. I can also set an algorithmic rule that verifies if all the walls and the speakers displayed image/sound a certain times. There are various strategies. I will probably prototype two of them and select the one that works better. Also, I still have not decided whether I should add an interface within the space or not. I can't find the justification for a specific interface for this piece. I will have to talk about it with the supervisor I guess...

Flowcharts

Technical specifications

• Table and chair.
• Computer (portable or tower) with decent graphic card (at least 256MB) and RAM (at least 2GB).
• Projector and rig.
• 2 x infrared camera.
• 4 x infrared spots.
• Railroad toy.
• 5 x switch carpets.
• Arduino microcontroller.
• General electronic/electric components.
• 5 channels output sound card.
• Power supply.
• 4 x Speakers and 4 x speaker stands.
• Christmas lights.
• Plexiglas circular piece – diameter of 3ft.
• Circular frame for plexiglas piece.
• 9 x coroplast panels.

Bibliography in progress...