November 09, 2008 - last edited November 10 @ 12h39AM
“Surrounded” will be an audiovisual interactive installation that will contain video, sound and sensors. This piece’s purpose is to tackle the growing aggressiveness of technologies serving advertising business in public spaces. Through an irritating audio-visual stage, “Surrounded” will show, using a figure of contrast, that technologies have invaded public spaces harassing people with advertisements. The main interface will be the floor and will consist of circular pads on which participants will have to walk on once they are lit. This action triggers projected comercials, as if people were tracked by machines that react to each of their movements to try to catch their attention and sell them a product. While interactors keep wandering around, the audio-visual content becomes messier, noisier and louder as a consequence of added layers of sound and video matter. When walked on, a central bigger light pad triggers a short peaceful and quiet pure moment to generate the contrast mentioned above.
Today, in most of post-industrial societies, service industry has taken over the economy. Some of its components include news media, advertising, cultural production and promotion. Anyone can easily witness these everyday manifestations as their numbers have increased in the past decades and are still growing now that the Internet is taking part in this economical sector.
What once started as small hand drawn posters have become printed ones. Calling paperboys have become radio commercials. Television eventually integrated these two well-established techniques into audio-visual commercial clips. Due to the popularization of television and technical growth in the audio visual field, screens became more and more present in public spaces. Nowadays screens are everywhere harassing you with the latest news and the hottest hype product while using the newest technology to lure you into unintentionally consuming more than you intend to.
“Surrounded” is an interactive installation that addresses the issue of immersion in advertisements and mass media. In a fairly large space, participants are encircled by a surround sound system and hemmed in walls that hold projections. As people walk into the space, random videos are triggered and projected on the walls while sound follows from the images’ position. The more movement there is, the more videos and sound are triggered overlaying one on top of the other. When the maximum “saturation point” or “audio-visual chaos” is reached, interactors are invited to move into the center of the space. Once they reach that position, the images fade out and the sounds quiet: a peaceful and zen-like moment is offered to the audience that contrasts with the previous chaos.
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) determines a maximum number of interactors. In “Surrounded”, people will come in an out whenever they wish and will have the ability to decide how long they want to live the experience.
I rarely had the chance to design an installation containing a message. Most of my previous work consisted of aesthetic exploration, abstract representations or purely entertainment installations. The only project I designed that differed was an interactive tool for educational purposes (a web-based learning game about Genomics for secondary school pupils).
Thus, it will be a semi-open-scenario installation where a main cycle gets to be repeated. Different sets of variations will be programmed in order to surprise people that want to experience it more than once. To avoid the redundancy of content, the latter should be as diversified as possible. A large part of random rules will be integrated in the code in order to allow that effect.
In the last few months, I have seen a lot of different examples of “new media commercials” where interactive technologies are used to serve the purpose of bombarding us with images, news and advertisements. It can be seen in malls on the streets and in subway stations to promote products. 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 people will come for the exhibition and 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 a challenge. Also, the installation I intend to produce will be more immersive than the works in public spaces described above.
In the installation, nothing is displayed on the screen walls until somebody walks in. As soon as one enters, a video is displayed on the opposite screen wall and sound is heard from the speaker assigned to this wall. If another person comes in, the projected video will go from the first to the second wall and sound will play on the opposite speaker. As more people enter, images and sound will keep moving from a wall to another wall, adding layers to the video and the sound. When sound and images overlay too much, a bigger pad 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 take the shape of a beach landscape, a zen garden, an individual memory, a mountain landscape, etc. with extra spatial sound that will take advantage of participants' position in the "sweet spot". After a short peaceful moment, noise invades screens that continue displaying images until the system either reaches another cycle in case there are still people inside, or goes back to standby mode.
http://ada.ini.ethz.ch/presskit/papers/ada-icra2003.pdf
http://ciam.dyndns.org/mfco/en/?q=flock
http://www.daito.ws/works_e.html
My reponses
Jessica's Response
November 03, 2008
Look at this!!!
October 15th, 2008
What to do ?
I just realized that I can't find an idea for my thesis project for two main reasons :
That may be two reasons why I have trouble finding something.
The team work for designing projects often lead to making compromises, so that one could find a little piece of himself in the final work. And it always worked well.
But personally, I have never really been concerned with the content of the pieces I designed within teams. I just used my veto when I didn't like the aesthetics/concept at all.
I was always more involved in the technological/programming part of these pieces as well as the production process (very important hen a piece is a team work).
Now I find myself in and MFA program, and I don't know what to do.
As you may have seen in my presentation (refer to "Thesis Statement 0.09" below), my past work though helped me knowing on which issues I wanted to focus more for my MFA. But it never mentions how am I going to apply that, and to what !
So this is the point I recently reached : I "unfortunately" know more about how to make things -container- than I know about what I want these things to serve/represent/express - content-.
October 6th, 2008
Thesis Statement #1 :
Regaining interactor’s focus on sound despite the presence of video screen(s) within audiovisual interactive installations.
Interesting... huh ?
Thesis Statement #2 :
Maximizing the degree of interactor’s participation through the control of feedback in open and/or closed scenario interactive installations without instructions.
I guess it will make sens once explained...
Interactor : Person that would, in a classic communication scheme, be a receiver. In interactive media, as creations also require actions from the receiver, it becomes an interactor.
Open Vs. Closed Scenario : An open scenario interactive installation has no start point and never end. A closed scenario interactive installation has a beginning and, eventually/theoretically, an end.
Notes:
Notes:
Notes:
Notes:
Too much instructions on how to interact with a system may considerably lower the level of immersion.
Specific interfaces with no instruction increase surprise effects, quality of immersion and extend time of experience.
Specific interfaces must be the most intuitive for the end user.
A screen hypnotizes people easily and their focus on sound reactions is therefore lowered.
All these installations follow one same path : human - computer - output.
Intuitiveness of specific interfaces is a key element to reach interactors quickly and efficiently.
Regaining interactor’s focus on sound despite the presence of video screen(s) within audiovisual interactive installations.
Maximizing the degree of interactor’s participation through the control of feedback in open and/or closed scenario interactive installations without instructions.
The project these prerogatives obviously lead to would part of the Mechatronics Reserach Group.
September 29th, 2008
As you may have noticed, this is not even the version 0.1 of my Thesis Statement.
2 main reasons :
Thesis Statement #1 :
Regaining interactor’s focus on sound despite the presence of video screen(s) within audiovisual interactive installations.
Interesting... huh ?
Thesis Statement #2 :
Maximizing the degree of interactor’s participation through the control of feedback in open and/or closed scenario interactive installations without instructions.
I guess it will make sens once explained...
My past experiences with interactive audiovisual installations always made me think of the best ways to reach interactors efficiently and fast.
After a wonderful experience and based on observed interactors' behavior made during running installations, I noticed and could witness the power of the screen. The way "light sculptures", as would Ray Bradbury say, capture the full attention of the brains made me ask myself : how can we manage to retake some of this attention and put it on sound to balance the cognitive process ? This is how the first thesis statement came up.
Unfortunately, not everybody has the patience of discovering on its own how an interactive installation works. Therefore, the first reflex is to put instructions. But these will cut half the fun of the experience and will make it last shorter... However, if the project designer/artist/creator manages to program a system that would react fast at certain points and slowly at other moments, he will create a "motivation figure" (Louis-Claude Paquin, "Comprendre les medias interactifs", IQ, 2007) - creating the envy for the interactor to discover the whole installation.
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