The kinetic and chaotic nature of a crowd movement is reflected back by an apparent living convolution of light a large echo chamber of sound and light in the Great Hall.
Lost Referential proposes to project artificial life principles to an interactive kinetic light architecture. A set of eight automated luminaries will have their focal point computed by a flocking (herd like) behaviour.
These lights will not be passive
actors manipulated by direct interactive manipulation. They will be true living
characters, on a constant move, evolving and reacting to the audience.
The walls will become a large sensory membrane. Lost Referential utilize a vast number of sensory cells (64) distributed throughout the hall periphery.
Lost Referential challenges the crowd and the personal experience. One single person will control the flow and evolution of the system by means of his/her heartbeat. The crowd will, in turn, react and adapt to one's beat and influence the swarming by its sole body presence.
A total of eight independent sound sources
will accentuate the lifeliness of the lighting and the heartbeat propagation.
Interactive scenario...
A light cone shines on the heartbeat (medical ECG device) interface. One person puts the sensor clip on his/her finger.
The piece starts
.
One beat after another, all the moving lights "pulse" their intensity and move towards their next location. They all obey to this improvised conductor.
These states are derived from the crowd movement around the space. The motion detection systems computes crowd displacement and establishes areas of interest. The area where there is the most disturbance becomes the center of revolution of the swarms. The swarms will either avoid this area, revolve around it and then breaking into smaller swarms that revolves on themselves.
The system will memorize crowd patterns thru time and will utilize it as navigating material, synthesizing a virtual path from this turmoil of data.
Divided by group of four sensors, an array of 16 lights will systematically incarnate an histogram of activity depicted by regions of the wall brightness. This will give constant visual feedback to the crowd.
The program will decide to skip or demultiply heart beats in order to create tension and unstability. The program will also react to the racing of the beat, generating even more disturbance in the light and sound.
LOUIS-PHILIPPE DEMERS: lpdemers@kunstmacchina.com or http://www.kunstmacchina.com/
BILL VORN: d356644@er.uqam.ca or http://www.comm.uqam.ca/~vorn/chaos.html