Restart / Refrain (2017)
RESTART / REFRAIN
Restart/Refrain is an interactive installation created by Vertigo, Denmark. In October 2017 I created the visuals for this installation, which was exhibited for one month at the Danish Museum of Telecommunication, ENIGMA.
“In collaboration with ENIGMA museum and the three artists Mikkel Meyer, SØS Gunver Ryberg and Jens B Christiansen (Rumpistol) Vertigo created the twofold experience, Restart/Refrain.
First part of the experience was three live CUBE concerts based on music created by Mikkel Meyer, Søs Gunver Ryberg and Jens B Christiansen and visual effect projected on the sides of the CUBE. The music was created special for this event to ensure it both reflected the artists’ own personal styles and could be remixed afterwards in a re-experience of the event in an installation.
The second part of the experience was an installation based on the live event. Inside the CUBE an interactive space was created by sensors that tracked the visitors’ movement, thus inviting them to create their own remix of the live event. In this way the visitors’ movement inside the CUBE created an echo of the live event based on both the audio and visual parts. With their bodies as the input they could control the audio/visual output.
Vertigo’s mainpart in Restart/Refrain was creating the visual experience, building the frame and programming the interactive part of the installation.” – Vertigo
The interactive chain:
Kinect detects users from above (custom software by Vibeke Bertelsen) -> Max for sound control -> VDMX for visuals -> madMapper for mapping onto the frame.
Every time a new user is detected, a layer of music is revealed in the soundscape. As users move around in the cube, the mix of the three musician’s sets create ever changing expressions.
The visuals I created provide a visual cue for the visitors to know which musician’s music they are listening to. The amount of brightness in the layer corresponding to the amount of the individual musician’s set in the sound. As new visitors enter and exit the installation, the sound and visuals change places. The musicians were recorded via Kinect in the original performance (and prior), and the recording was used as a mask on a layer of macro-recorded nature footage.
