Continuing Source of Inspiration

Freewriting 6

My interactive installation piece Saturday Night Face was inspired by the disco dance floors of the seventies, and like Camille Utterback's Visual Resolve, it can also be used as a tool for artistic exploration. The piece consists of a room large enough to house a 196'x196' floor, made up of forty-nine 2'x2' pressure sensitive squares, a large display screen or projector on the wall, a digital camera station outside the room, and a group of networked computers. Each participant, before entering the room would have a picture of his or face taken at the digital camera station.

This picture would be broken up into 49 separate files, each placed in one of the 49 photo folders. Each one of these folders would hold the same square of each of the participant's faces. So in other words, you wouldn't find someone's eye in the same folder that you'd find someone's lip or chin. What you would find would be a picture of each participant's eye, or a part of the face close to the eye.

Each square on the disco floor is programmed to display a different file from its corresponding photo folder each time the square is stepped on. Once inside the room, participants are free to walk or dance around the disco floor, each step displaying a different part of a different persoon's face, depending on which square was stepped on. The result: the display screen would show a combination of different 49ths of different people's faces depending on the activity on the floor. If no one walks or dances, nothing changes.

This is only one of the endless possibilities for an environment such as this. If music was added, it would become an interactive dance floor that could be used in clubs. If different images or objects or groups of text are placed in the photo folders, countless other situations could be arranged. It could be used as an exciting interactive learning tool for children, an interactive board game or video game (remember Nintendo's Power Pad?), a giant game of Minesweeper, a musical instrument, plus endless others that I'm not creative enough to think of.