Demonstrators
T_Visionarium I
T_Visionarium I is an interactive immersive virtual environment
set within a Dome, twelve meters in diameter and nine meters high,
made of inflatable fabric and articulated to a satellite reception,
recording and database system. It allows viewers to spatially navigate
a televisual database and apply a recombinatory search matrix to create
emergent narratives from the database's network of digital streams.
T_Visionarium I was premiered at Eurallile, Lille, France
as part of the 2004 European Cultural Capital Lille Festival and at
Casa Dell'Architettura Rome in 2006 as part of the La Rivoluzione
Algorithmica international exhibition.
Upon entering the Dome the viewer places a position-tracking device
connected to stereo cable-less headphones upon his/her head. The viewer
then steps onto a control platform at the center of the dome, where
a touch screen interface, projector and control hardware are positioned.
The projection system is fixed on a motorized pan tilt apparatus mounted
on a tripod. By means of the touch screen interface, the viewer then
selects an option from a recombinatory search matrix. The matrix allows
for algorithmic searching and recombination of data sets from within
a televisual database. This database is recorded during a selected
weekly period of time from eighty simultaneous satellite television
channels. The matrix operates across a number of different parameters
such as keywords, phrases, color, pattern, ambience etc. On selection
of a parameter, the matrix then extracts and distributes all the corresponding
broadcast embodiments of the parameter over the entire projection
surface of the dome. The viewer, by moving their head in different
directions, and thus the position of the projected image, shifts from
one channel's embodiment of the selected parameter to the next.
The acoustic delivery system is based on the use of RF cable-less
headphones, which each viewer wears while inside the dome. Thirty-two
audio channels are interactively mixed down for stereo RF delivery
to all the headphones. The mixing of these channels is handled dynamically
in immediate relationship to the movement of the pan tilt projection
system, so that a fully spatialised sound-scape can be defined inside
the dome architecture. This is directly linked to the distribution
of the visual content. T_Visionarium I enables new recombinatory
narrative content to be generated by means of the viewer's critical
navigations across the data sets stored in its database. These data
sets of televisual information, received and stored by the computational
system, are re-constituted across the interior skin of the dome according
to interactive encounters between viewer, apparatus and data, revealing
emergent dramaturgies of narrative content.
For T_Visionarium I, twenty-four hours of television (from
across the European continent) was recorded, analyzed and organised
into a database suitable for real-time reassembly. During operation,
viewers can reassemble this material by selecting from a range of
keywords. For example, by selecting the keyword "dialogue" all the
broadcast data is reassembled according to this descriptor. In this
way the viewer experiences a revealing synchronicity between all the
channels linked by the occurrence of keyword tagged images. All these
options become the recombinatory tableau in which the original data
is given new and emergent fields of meaning.
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