Connect interactive video and audio installation, 2019

Connect is an interactive video and four-channel audio installation that uses 3D depth sensing technology and computer programming to probe our daily experiences of connecting to a digitally networked world. Participants discover local and global video imagery and sound through the moving shapes of their own bodies as they enter the room.

Our moving silhouettes, captured live by camera, are incorporated into a projected video display as the interface between two contrasting streams of visual imagery, from local and worldwide contexts. Sources of footage include feeds of world news broadcasts, stock market activity, flight tracking data, Twitter, webcams from world cities and the International Space Station, headlines in many languages, currency conversions, weather maps, archival film and local video footage. The projection background is filled by one source of imagery while our silhouettes in the foreground are filled by another; intersections are created between each individual and the larger public sphere. There are four speakers, one in each corner of the room. Audio playing from the front speakers relates to the foreground imagery seen within the silhouettes, while sound emanating from the back speakers is suggestive of the background imagery. Which speakers are playing changes according to our location in the room. Since our movements determine what imagery is revealed and what sound mix is heard, we actively create the video and audio composition, capturing or avoiding imagery and sound with our bodies.

This embodied experience encourages us to contemplate our own relationship to the content that is depicted and heard, drawn from the world around us. Our active role in shaping the visual and aural environment provides an opportunity to reflect on how this experience differs from the ways we usually passively receive and use information technology. Connect contrasts the agency and immediacy felt within the interactive installation, with the mediation that pervades much of our digital connections in everyday life, where the content we consume and create is framed and formatted by the medium of its transmission. The engagement in Connect encourages a heightened awareness of technology’s latent role in mediating our interactions with and understanding of the world around us.

This project was developed with the help of Jean-Claude Batista, an Ottawa senior software developer, and Ray Gould, an Ottawa sound designer, with the support of Ottawa’s Artengine collective and the financial assistance of the City of Ottawa and Ontario Arts Council Exhibition Assistance.

Connect was presented as a solo exhibit at the Ottawa Art Gallery from April 12 to August 11, 2019.