Inhabitance

Abstract

Inhabitance is a Digital Interactive Installation employing the use of projection design, sound design, infrared depth mapping, and complex programming in the languages Processing and Java, in order to create an experiential work that leaves a lasting impact on both participants and the work itself. At it’s core, Inhabitance is about spatial and sensory presence. Taking distinct inspiration from other interactive projection works such as Snow Fall (2009) by Italian media studio FUSE°, and Text Rain (1995) by Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv, Inhabitance encourages participants to allow the boundary between their physical bodies and digital representations to blur. Participants who enter the active area of the installation are greeted with a white silhouette of themselves in a sea of letters. These letters, as they will soon discover, are not stationary. They react and interact with the movements made within the active area of the installation. Similarly to how participants in Text Rain soon begin to experiment with the interaction with the text, those in Inhabitance begin to “play” and test the rules of this newfound sensory environment. However, there is one more layer of interaction to be discovered. As soon as a letter moves, it creates a sound. Another is added to the space when another letter is moved. Each interactive object on the screen fills the space with sound, allowing participants to orchestrate their own accompaniment to the space. As those inside come to allow the boundary between physical and digital to blur, they now also begin the process of blurring the boundary between sight and sound. Reminiscent of Synesthesia (the condition where one sense triggers the experience of a different sense, such as sound triggering a sense of touch), the blurring of senses allows participants to experience a sense of “diminished consciousness of self”, and create an audiovisual experience totally unique to them. These letters and sounds will continue long after the participants have left the space, allowing messages, chords, or any other lasting impression to be passed onto those that will come next. Each new participant’s experience is a fully unique version, informed by those that have come before. “Under the hood” of Inhabitance is a complex marriage of software and hardware. Kinect cameras create an accurate depth map of the space, and feed their findings directly into Processing. Processing, with the help of libraries crafted by Daniel Schiffman, takes the Kinect information and uses that to draw a silhouette of any participants in a specific range. The letters and sounds are also handled by Processing, but without the use of a pre-built library. The letter objects, sonic interaction, and collision have all been coded by hand and are specific to the use-case of Inhabitance.