Proximity
Assisted Video Interactive Installation_2015
An installation made during the winter 2015/16. The whole purpose of the it was to have a method and an opportunity to approach to people and invade their personal space. As a foreigner living in Germany my first sixth months were particularly hard to find a way to adapt and feel safe and comfortable, and also I started to notice that certain cultural patterns that I was used to, they didn’t work anymore or they were perceived as odd for the locals. This situation brought to me the question. How people perceive their own personal space in the most common situations?, as for example meet and greet someone.
The installation/ Performance consisted to drive the people's attention towards the screen of a laptop where there was a looped video of people from different nationalities saying “hello” in their native language and using a green screen as a background, because when the people approached to it they were placed also in front of a green screen, they were thinking that they were having a conversation with someone else on other part of the world, but this was just to be used as an excuse, so then I was able to approach and talk to them, but with the intention of getting really close to them.
Some of them react in a nice and polite way others were extremely uncomfortable.
Finally to have a recopilation of the experience, some data was recorded and it is the one that is presented next in the gif format.
To collect the information an algorithm in processing 3.0 was written. This one was using a computer vision system, using a kinect as a device to capture the location of the body centers of two people and measure the distance between them and capturing photos every time the distance was less than 30 cm between two bodies.
The outcoming result was a piece of surveillance art, monitoring how we affect each other.
The installation was exhibited during the 2016 version of Transmediale at HKW {Haus der Kulturen der Welt} Berlin, Germany.
Set Up of the Installation & Conversation Piece
