At Artissima, the international fair of contemporary art in Torino, visitors are able to use simple hand and arm gestures to browse a visual catalogue of recent art work exhibited at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, an important museum in the city.

The technology is based on sophisticated gesture recognition, while the end-result for the visitor is a radically simple content navigation system in which the images are projected on a large screen, and interaction is performed via nothing but a flat luminous surface.

The project was developed by Jan-Christoph Zoels, Yaniv Steiner and Ofer Luft of Experientia, an international experience design consultancy based in Torino.

A prototype of the gesture-based interface was previously used to navigate Google Earth and to guide club dancing during a music rave. The various interfaces are all based on the smartRetina™ technology, which provides the designer with a programmable “eye”, allowing him to easily design new experiences and interactions which do not require a tangible interface.

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“The Virtual Museum of Canada must unashamedly create compelling experiences and should experiment with game-like interfaces that are strongly content-based for the born-digital generations.”

This is one of the core conclusions of the Next Generation report (”experience design” chapter) on the future development of the popular Virtual Museum of Canada website.

Lightmodulator is a series of projects by architect Nick Rich which work with light and the phenomena of moments in time where light and the materials it lands on or passes through create magical transformations of space. His initial research has been to understand the sun’s movement and the changing quality of light it gives. Analysis of the sun’s movement can be found on his website portfolio ’sun studies’ and ‘daylight - information from the sky’.

Nick explains “I moved on to experimenting with light modulation through different media. The process of making the media; be it a grid, lense or refractor and observing the effects, puts you in direct contact with light in a similar why to making shadow puppets or playing with your shadow. It is this interaction between us and light which I find interesting and which I’m trying to build into my work.”



(via Interactive Architecture)

Bitfall is an installation by Julius Popp where water is being used to project images taken from the internet. A computer observes various news websites and chooses thereafter the images to be displayed. 128 nozzles are controlled by synchronised magnetic valves, and the water drops falling to the ground shape the images. The visual information is only tangible for a second before the drops merge to become water again.



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An electro-kinetic sound installation by the London based collective Someth;ng, Tape uses simple analogue playback to allow users an arena in which to play with self-recorded sound and explore the effects of playback and sound synthesis. Housed in a transparent acrylic panel, Tape allows its user not only to view the oft-hidden components needed to record sound, but also to manipulate them as they see fit. Using Tape’s continuous tape loop and assemblage of appropriated and hand built electro-mechanical analogue parts, the user can not only record and play sounds, but physically slide, twist and move these components within the panel to explore their roles and uses.



The experience moves away from the precision and care often needed to create audio tracks and allows for the innate curiosity and playfulness that drives us to experiment, in this case, with sound. As sound recording moves ever further into the digital sphere, Tape allows users to explore and play with the analogue processes we now take for granted in our everyday lives.

(via pixelsumo)

Mind Your Head by Philip Marston is a simple and playful installed object which the viewer/participator (by wearing the headphones and walking under and around the suspended light) can audibly experience the invisible electromagnetic frequencies which leak and radiate out of an ordinary fluorescent tube light.

The headphones, with an EMF (electromagnetic frequency) pick-up attached, provide a new form of intimate but unnerving physical interaction with an overlooked mundane object, which hopefully highlights our every increasing environmental exposure to man-made electromagnetic fields.

(via pixelsumo)

X-Ray
This installation by All of Us offers visitors an insight into the artist’s thinking behind the painting ‘A view on the Stour near Deadham’ in a fun and engaging process. By walking in front of the projected painting, the visitor casts a virtual shadow over the image, revealing an x-ray of the painting underneath. By comparing the finished painting and the x-ray, the visitor can see alterations in the work that Constable had made during its development. The project uses video camera tracking to create the x-ray shadow, slowly fading between the images allowing the visitor to notice subtle differences between the two.



Grid
All of Us’ second installation, Grid, illustrates Constable’s process of ‘squaring up’ an image in the journey from early sketches to finished work. A replica sketch of ‘Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows’ is mounted inside an display case, with thread marking out a grid over image (in a similar technique to Constable). The visitor simply touches the glass above the grid to scale up the corresponding section in the full projected painting. The installation reinforces the traditional techniques used by Constable and emphasizes the meticulous accuracy of scale in both his sketch and the final work.

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This installation by All of Us was created for the 18th century Norfolk House Music Room, Plink Plonk used mechanical music boxes as playful delicate input devices, producing their own sound output (the tune ‘You are my sunshine’). A visual narrative responded to the turn of each music box, with each scene containing different reactives. The top photo shows stars glowing around a single music box as it is being turned. The bottom photo shows the end eclipse sequence. Overall it went down really well and had some great feedback.

(via pixelsumo)

London based Sennep created an interactive dandelion for Transvision 2006. Elegantly simple and playful, this installation allowed users to blow away the seeds of a dandelion clock using a real electric hairdryer.

“Blowing it apart is a popular pastime for children. The number of blows required to completely rid the clock of its seeds is deemed to be the time of day.”

(via pixelsumo)

Scrollbars is a series of installations and physical scrollbar-representations created by Dutch artist Jan Robert Leegte.

According to Jan Robert, most of us consider the scrollbar to be a virtual object - but in use it triggers reactions such as frustration, which suggests a subconscious acceptance of the inherent ‘reality’ of these objects.

Jan Robert Leegte has been exploring the sculptural properties of internet browsers and software, such as scrollbars, buttons and table borders since 1997.

(via we-make-money-not-art)

Aleph is an experimental public display, that is using the spaces, people and objects it faces as a palette to display messages from hidden viewpoints. When looking at a small mirror, it reflects a fraction of the space around us, when looking at a mirror façade, it reflects most things around us, containing segments that are dark or bright, red or green.

But if we build a matrix of small mirrors, which can adjust their tilt according to the site they are facing, we can create a display that uses the ever changing flux of the place to show images from certain points in space. It will not be comprehendable from all viewpoints, just from specific ones, asking visitors to explore the space, or providing surprising flashes in a public setup that can stay around the edge of comprehension.

Project by Adam Somlai-Fischer, 2005

(via Interactive Architecture)

Enis Selmanagic’s playful installation Vps fuck & Tür Stehn im Bild uses light scanners and transfers visitor movements into unique digital pictures and panorama prints. The movements modify prefabricated fragments of video animations and sounds. Each animation fragment represents a different information which can form new knowledge when put in connection to the others.

With the repeating passing of the light scanners, new picture animations are added. A panorama of the screenshots is printed on a 10m roll of glossy photo paper.

Besides, another light sensor controls a shredder. Whenever it is activated, the shredder destroys parts of the printed picture.

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As the visitor enters the inner cube, sensors are released and the space starts to warp. The edges of the room misalign, the side walls bend, the hight of the room shrinks and the whole space seems to modify its shape according to the movements of the person in the space. The walls and the ceiling start to move in a threating manner towards the viewer. By that time the viewer will become aware of the meaning of horizontals and verticals in spacial perception.

by Harald Freudenthaler, Museum of Perception Upper Austria 2004

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Alexander Wiethoff’s Colour Vision, installed at the Museum of Perception, in Rohrbach (Austria), allows the visitor to change the room colour with the position of his body. Each posture symbolizes a different status like activity, calmness, reflectiveness and is visualized by different colours.

[Alexander Wiethoff is a co-author of this blog]

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The interactive Tintoretto installation by Christian Möller and Marizio Seracini visualises the hidden layers of well-known paintings, using X-ray and infrared technology, for example the preliminary drawings, the priming and any areas which may have been painted over.

This visualisation system appears to the viewer as a virtual replica. It allows the viewer to wipe away each respective foreground by touching the surface of the picture. It is up to the individual to erase their way through the picture layer by layer.

In this way, the observer is able to navigate through the third dimension of the painting and discover a unique image anatomy from an important work of art from the 16th century.

Interactive painting in The Bridge, Museum of Contemporary Art, New Orleans/USA 1996

The Audio Grove installation by Christian Moeller consists of a circular wooden platform 12 metres in diameter, on which 56 vertical steel posts extend 5.5 metres up toward the ceiling. Each of the steel posts is connected to a touch-sensitive sensor system. This forest of vertical steel posts is an interface through which light and sound can be physically experienced and controlled. Visitors touching the posts can evoke a soundscape which always results in a harmonic whole whatever the conceivable combination of interactions. To accomplish this, the acoustical structures were perfected within a physical modeling system.

This interactive light and sound installation by Christian Möller, allows the visitor to control a membrane of light with the frequency of her heartbeat, resulting in an almost overwhelming physical experience.

Interactive light and sound installation at Design Horizonte, Naxos Halle. Frankfurt, 1993.

In each of the two cities Linz and Budapest a foot bridge made of wooden planks are installed. If someone steps on a plank in one of the cities, an impulse released from the body weight is immediately sent to the other bridge. So a pulse can be felt in the other city, as the parallel plank lifts itself around 1 cm which releases a pounding noise. One can feel realistically the footsteps of strangers in a foreign city.

(via Interactive Architecture)

The Do Not Touch installation by Christian Möller is part of an exhibition along the theme energy. A five meter tall stainless steel pole is standing in the center of a huge warning sign on the gallery floor telling the visitor “do not touch”.

It creates a conflict by tempting the visitor to do precisely what he is warned not to do. This conflict, when resolved through disobedience results in a jolting physical experience. Whenever somebody decides to ignore the warning by touching the pole he receives a significant electric shock amplified by sound.

Christian Möller, Installation in the Energy Gallery at the Science Museum London, 2004.