Aurora: GENE 29 the future beings by Paola Tognazzi

Aurora is an interactive multiplayer audio-visual installation, designed for physical spaces and digital facades, utilizes mobile wireless sensory technology for movement capture data. It analyzes the dynamic energies and rhythms of the audience’s bodies, translating them into musical and visual projections.

Utilizing open-source w_dynamics software and iPhones as controllers, the installation captures users’ movement data in real-time. Two participants, each with their own iPhone, collaboratively create live interactive visuals, feeding back and inspiring the one to the other. Through the touch screen they can change the audios and the type of brush with which to draw.

In Aurora technology and Body become one. The interactive design allows an immediate connection between body and software, so the users can immediately see the effect of their movements and learn from it in real time.

Aurora explores the sensuality of interactive designs and how to use visuals to create and navigate personal and intimate environments. Through a collective painting game, it physically and emotionally engage the audience to develop physical awareness and listening of the body.

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The final projection tells the stories of the participants’ body dynamics, transforming the architectural space into living, organic organisms – a space for regaining awareness and bodily expression. The installation transforms gallery rooms into mirrors reflecting the inner world of the audience wearing sensors. As they create the painting, their private experiences are smoothly transitioned into the public sphere through fluid spirals, revealing the identity of their movements and showing the outside world what is happening within.»

The feedback from the audience was:Technology and body become one in an hypnotic experience!

Aurora artistic statement:

Aurora comes from my passion with the body. Knowing, feeling, listening to, and learning from the body’s extreme intelligence. The brain is part of the body our thoughts and memories are processed in and through it. The body is not just a tool or an interface but our root to the world. The body is what we are. And yet we know so little about it. We know how many letters there are in the alphabet, but we don’t know how many bones and muscles we have, never mind all their movement possibilities. And yet we truly communicate more with our body than with words.

This passion leads to questions like: questions like, does technology shape the body? Does the body shape technology? What’s the next stage in the evolution of humanity? Will we merge with the machines? But more importantly, how can we re-perceive and listen to the body as body, today in the digital era, to stimulate the expressive qualities generated by movements and conditions like will, effort, and desire.

Technical Rider:

Materials that provides the artist:
1 Macbook OSX, The Softwares: W_dynamics and Processing, 1 Ipod touch

Materials that provides the host:
1 video projector, cables to connect the projector to the computer, 1 router with local wi-fi to connect the sensors of the iphones to the computer, 1 Ipod touch or Iphone, 2 Loudspeakers.