ENTE
Ente - entity - is an interactive audio-visual installation, which I performed as artist-in-residence at the Audio-visual Lab of Etopia Center for Art and Technology of Zaragoza, with the help of engineers Eduardo Estopiñán and Miguel Ángel Varona, specialists in interactive audio-visual technologies and OpenFrameworks programming.
It is a video mapping device on moving objects through three-dimensional capture with Kinect cameras, with multi-projection and quadraphonic audio system. Projections cover any moving object on a circular scene with a diameter of about three meters (120 in). The intervention of the object (or performer) triggers the moving images and a surround quadraphonic sound piece. Different textures cover the object and the circular scene independently. Ente allows thousands of audio-visual combinations of one and a half minutes, along with the infinite shapes that each participant can create.
This installation, initially designed to the exhibition hall of Etopia, include twelve screens that surround the interactive device arranged as an eye shape. The screens show the interventions that are occurring in the device, and others interventions that have already occurred, captured by two overhead cameras. The device is autonomous and any visitor can interact with it to be part of the piece.
My intention is to reflect upon the technological alienation, to do an allegory of our relationship with the audio-visual medium today, which not only shows us images and sounds, but also observes, manipulates and utilizes us. Ente gobbles, captures and transforms any intervention. The device affects and captures anyone who interacts with it, reifies it and integrates it into a whole, generating a technological organism. This integration is disseminated and broadcasted as a model to the people, who can observe himself and others in the same context. In fact, this is the way by which a perfect social control system is made, where we become, whether consciously or not, the most important collaborators and protectors.
INTERACTION
The device allows to interact at any time. People who wish to intervene in the creation of new visuals, may do it, simply by entering into the circular scene, manipulating fabrics and diverse objects that work as mobile screens. To this end, guided visits were arranged at Etopia in which, after the authorization of participants, the pieces resulting from the people interventions are recorded and shown in the exhibition (on the screens), and are also published in social media. This way, the discourse of the work is completed: the public becomes the most important systemic collaborator, as happens in mass audio-visual media.
In these guided visits also take place a performative demonstration by the butoh dance master Gonzalo Catalinas, who introduces himself in a white, amorphous and elastic costume, to become a mobile and mutant screen. Butoh (or Butô), a dance created in Japan in the 50s, is perfect for the device; his slow and deformed movements adapt perfectly to the content, the narrative, and the audio-visual system of Ente. The body of Gonzalo Catalinas is absorbed, reified, and becomes an indissoluble part of an entity.