Digital Swamp

Rather than a door, the gallery entrance traverses a few meters of transparent plastic tunnel. It requests that the exhibit’s visitors relinquish control of their identity, and accept being part of an organic observation process.

A large microscope stands in the gallery center. It is aimed at the room below, where guests are asked to descend via stairs. Once there, a backdrop of ambient and clockwork sounds play in a low-lit space, while a puddle of rainbow gamer keyboards glow as they are typed on, stepped on, or lay upon. Guests may do what they will, and indeed the tactile and luminescent experience compels and invites one to move and listen to try to grasp how the sounds and lights of the room react to one’s motion. The dim and the din compel exploration and attempts to communicate with the aural and visual mechanics.

Back in the microscope room above, a screen that shows the recorded contours of the visitor’s movements below. Fluid images swim in a digital swamp that projects the body’s motion as an organism, coloured and outlined, stripped of its outer layers and distilled to an animated sequence that has tracked and reduced what is unique to each participant. Each guest can print a quick response code the identifies their video, and post it on the gallery wall to join those who have passed before. They can then go back down to make more, and the liquid recordings posted on the gallery wall have become a part of a larger ameobic community that expands as visitors enter and leave through the plastic tunnel.