This semester, I’m in a really cool class which will explore:

Approaches to new media; electronic and digital control of objects, projections, and sound in interactive installations, performances, and exhibitions.

At the end of the semester, I’ll have an installation in an exhibition utilizing techniques taught in the class. This blog was created largely to document that process.

Project Conception

For this assignment, we were tasked with coming up with four ideas for exhibitions at an art museum in Spain. We were not given a budget, so the sky’s kinda the limit. My four ideas are below.

Idea 1.

In a very large, dark room several “confessionals” are more or less uniformly distributed on either side of the room, leaving a large gap in between. Click here for a visual. Each confessional is a 12 x 8 x 8 room with a glass ceiling. Each confessional has a number, and inside, has a small pew and a base station microphone sitting on a table, along with a keyboard. The room should seem ominous and secluded, like a forest at night. Each confessional has a water element on one side, which creates the constant sound of rain.

Each guest, upon entering the exhibition is given a particular confessional booth. Inside the booth, they enter in their age, and if they’d like to, their name. Their booth is randomly paired to a booth on the other side of the room. Guests are welcome to discuss whatever they like, with emphasis on sharing a story or a decision they’ve regretted. Once finished, each guest is given the option of meeting the person they spoke to. If both guests select yes, a light strip above their confessional, to their matching confessional is illuminated, and the sound of thunder is played, booming throughout the room. Guests are instructed to exit their confessional and meet in the middle before exiting the exhibition.

Idea 2

A large outline of a heart is painted on the floor in pink. Over a dozen little roomba-like robots wander the exhibition floor. Projected on the floor are pink dots which bounce around the room, and collide with the robots. On the top of each robot is light fixture with a particular curve which matches a small segment of the heart. The audience works together to find where each robot fits over the outline of the heart and to keep them in place. As the robots are lined up over the heart, they start to contain the pink dots inside the heart, and the light fixture on the top of them blinks pink. This exhibition focuses on love as collaboration and emphases that in a relationship, or a community, or a family, it is difficult for person to prevent the love from escaping.

Idea 3

This exhibition would loosely be based off of the Ancient Greece’s Temple of Zeus. In a large, high ceiling room, a large face internally glowing with a soft blue light juts up from the floor. Drones with soft white lights, drift around above, mimicking stars, but flocking like insects. Close to the large face is a pew to kneel on and incense burners. Each guest must leave their phone outside the exhibition and are, in turn, given a black piece of stone which resembles the shape and size of a smartphone. Each stone is embedded with a sensor which determines its distance from the blue face, and as guests approach it, their stone softly vibrates, intensifying as they grow closer.

Signifying the the omniscience and omnipresence of big data, this exhibition would hopefully invoke a sense of uneasiness, a “fear of god,” and raise the question, when does knowledge or information become dangerous?

Idea 4

Before entering the room, guests are able to download an app which allows them to select videos from the internet. Once in the room, guests can select any video; it’s consequently displayed on the ceiling, and walls of the room. Guests can interrupt the current video playing at anytime and substitute their own. Will this room become a place where people share interesting works of digital art with each other? Will they share memes or music videos? Will they share something gruesome or off-putting? Will this room become a place where people share openly and freely or will it become a room which people are nervous to enter because, for a moment, they won’t be able to escape whatever a stranger presents to them?