How perception reflects
- Ongoing project-
Production grant winning project:
Municipal Fund for the Arts, Vicente López 2021
This installation is an interactive light project where the movements of the spectators will be translated into light.
The work will have an initial "rest" light configuration, which will be visually friendly with soft, bluish and magenta tones.
When the spectators begin to approach the work, their movements will begin to generate very aggressive changes in the installation.
The light objects will react to the movement as a kind of natural chemical reaction, announcing a supposed danger in the room to the point of generating a great burst of light.
Through the interaction, the public should understand that the only way for the light objects to return to its initial state will be to pause its movements and observe its surroundings.
Concept
This projects explore ways of making the audience more aware of their immediate context by trying to lead the public to be more concern of how every action that we do has a direct impact in our local and global context.
If as individuals we are not able to be perceptive over our own acts, then we could never be able to really know what our actions are capable of. And the global context we are facing right now demands that each one of us must be conscious of our own integrity in order to care about others too.
The central idea of the work would be to generate a light installation with light object that will be sensitive to movement, spot lights that will be modified according to the movement that the sensors perceive. The light work will have an ‘initial state’, which will be pleasant to see to those who witness it from afar. But once the public begins to approach, the light setting will begin to change: the colors will turn red, orange and yellow and will become more saturated to the point of generating a great light burst.
Through a playful and intuitive interaction the public might understand that the only way for the installation to return to its ‘initial state’ will be for them to stand still or move away from the work. In some way, the spectators will have control over the lighting setting; they will be able to modify it at will, according to their movements. In other words, what would happen is that If they want, the work it can become ‘uninhabitable’ and over-saturated with colors that to us are generally linked to danger. But at the same time, if they want to create a peaceful environment they must stay still and simply observe what happens.
"How perception reflects", refers to my intention to be able to investigate how aware people are of their own actions in a given context. The installation precisely will give the viewer absolute control over the environment, therefore the person through their own movements and their perception can make the installation a pleasant and habitable place or a densely lit and explosive space.
Current status of the project
Thanks to the contribution of the Vicente López Municipal Fund Scholarship, the interactive system of the project has been successfully developed. I have worked together with Santiago Fernández, a new media artist and a master's student in Electronic Arts at UNTREF. He develops his works in collective instances, weaving concepts of cybernetics, poetry and visual arts, with which he has participated in various shows and events as part of artistic groups.
The operation of the interactive device is generated through motion capture software using the kinect camera and a series of Esp32 microcontrollers that translate the movements of the public into different flashes of light. This procedure can translate the amount of movement of different regions of a room into light reactions and transitions. Each light object has its own LED pixel luminaire connected to an Esp32 board that receives the signals that the software captures.
In this development, it has been possible for the lights to respond to movement in their vicinity and for them to modify their color according to the amount of movement that the sensor captures. That is, when someone approaches the object, it begins to generate its light transformation towards a state of alert (red and orange), if the viewer stays still, the lights return to their state of rest (blue) and if it returns to move they resume their state of alert. In the following videos you can see the first tests of the Software and how the luminaires react to movement.