#installaiton

Museum: Museum of History and Industry

Year: 2017

This is content from progress we’ve made the last couple of days, because tomorrow we are going to meet-up to finally decide on the chosen interface and chosen controls for it (the installation/how?), as explained within previous blogs, yes, the installation may be a bit late in figuring out, but we finally locked in all the other questions; what?why?, etc. So whatever installation we decide on will have a strong link to them and will also have a meaning and purpose as to why we are doing it. Here is our current questions underlying our installation, and hopefully they stay concrete. 

Inspiration?

Body Movies by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is one of his ‘Relational Architecture’ installations, thats basis is around the transformation of a physical space, playing around the projected shadows of the passers-by, whose silhouettes can measure between two and twenty-five metre. One of the key aspects of this installation is the exchange between strangers through the artwork. Rafael was able to engage an audience and through playfulness create social connections between strangers.

Assemblance by Umbrellium is another participatory installation whose theme is based on collaboration. Assemblance is a collaborative immersive environment filled with three-dimensional interactive light-structures sculpted by people's gestures and movements. Within the installation groups of participants can work together in order to create beautiful light structures; “The aim is to structure participation and build trust between people who must sometimes suspend disbelief in order to cooperate and coexist.”

What?

The concept for our participatory installation revolves around collaboration through the utilization of an interface as a medium to encourage social connections that will enable participants to work in unison and achieve the end goal of our installation within a physical space; especially those who do not know of each other.    

Why?  

In this day and age mobile technologies have  greatly affected our social relationships and in ways that individuals behave in public spaces. In Sherry Turkle's book ‘Alone Together’, she makes the point that “cafes, airport, and parks are no longer communal space but simply places of social collection; people gather in them but instead of speaking to each other they are attached to their mobile devices.”

As stated in Interactive Contemporary Art by Kathryn Brown; “For Turkle, contemporary  mobile technology fosters the creation of a tethered self and fosters nonsingularity…. We no longer truly inhabit public spaces by sharing with those around us because technology allows us to remain emotionally and socially tethered to our homes.”

Linking back to this, we wanted our installation to have a positive social impact and decided to do this by not only untethering the insularity and countering the impact of the concern of digital technologies on personal  behaviour and social relations, but by mainly creating a physical space where an audience can exchange with our installation and with other participants. Thus our emphasis is to facilitate connections between participants that lead to collaboration in a rather playful manner in order to reestablish the way in which people connect and relate to each other within physical spaces.

So tomorrow I will blog about the installation (how?) (interface and controls), etc. We decided to hold off the research until we get a solid installation. Again we had previous installation ideas, but as we developed our theme we realised we needed to change our installation idea, and it was the right choice to switch things up. 

Creator: Nikolaj B.S. Larsen | 2007

Spark of Light