#bewildermaze loop.coop

When you bring something from the digital world into real life, rather funny and sometimes peculiar things happen. 

the Bewildermaze project is a colourful concoction of a small team’s vision, lots of recycled materials and sounds, some 3D scanning, various other curious people and good fun times. We designed and produced an interactive technology unique to Loop.Coop, a maker-day, a modular installation structure and an interactive showcase event at Otherplace @ The Basement in Brighton.

At Loop.Coop, we’re really interested in creating spaces where anyone can listen, see, create, share, inspire and collaborate, Places to join in and play. The Bewildermaze project and event experiment with haptic interactions, sound visualisation, having a good play as grown up kids and just letting whatever shapes and sounds evolve, evolve! The intention is to express this idea of collaborative experimentation, while demonstrating some of the digital and sculptural technology we had been working away on in the studio.

So as you wonder through the space at the Bewildermaze final event, you see mystical creatures and plant life sculptures sat around every corner with vivid moving images depicting these life forms projected on and around them. You also come across small hanging cardboard cubes which soon appear to be the controllers for the sounds you are and the projected imagery. These cubes have different textures on each face and piezo pickup microphones on the inside attached to these faces. As you tap, scrape and rattle the cubes, the projected images react as sound visualisations of the vibrations fed into the piezo microphones.

The installation itself has been created with modularity in mind. The hexagonal structures with their voile fabric walls and ceilings have a skeleton of bamboo and are able to fold down quickly and simply, much like umbrellas. Each structure spans 3mx3m and can be hung at any desired hight from a ceiling or frame structure. The walls can be easily moved around to form all sorts of shapes, creating walkways and projector screens and rather importantly in this instance, computery equipment and cabley veils. 

The interactive objects were created during our “Make Amazing Stuff Day”, a kind of hack day where we gathered a bunch of curious minds to try out the whole process and see where it takes them. We had four different maker-stations, one for sculpture, one for surface decorating, one for audio recording and one for programming. The makers built their sculptures from recycled findings, made them wildly pretty with paint and glitter, recorded bewildering found sounds and finally used a 3D scanner to capture the object into the digital world and have it unite with its audio.

Bewildermaze was a darn ambitious project, we were really interested to hear what people made of it. We invited peers within our Brighton based digital and creative networks and provided a space for socialising to encourage feedback and ideas to flow. The approachable and experimental nature of the event gave way for lots of generous comments about the playfulness and opportunity for growth of the project. With the intentions we had developed the project from, we feel we opened up all the right questions and excited exactly the right kind of curiosity from the visitors.

Here’s something quite lovely that our host at Otherplace@thebasement had to say about us...