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Description of Installation
The interactive installation PARADISO has two different levels, senses and spaces. In the first level of PARADISO - "senses" - the viewer is "touched" by the dancer’s movement. Force feedback sensors with electroactive polymers and a custom-built 4D chair give tactile feedback on the skin of the viewer. Image, sound, wind and evaporated perfumes activate almost all the senses: sight, hearing, touch and smell.
The first level focuses on the concept of immersion. The visitor sits on a massage chair and four ipods with elastomere vibrator units placed on each limb of the body, both arms and legs. Head phones and a visual surround display play the film Paradiso.
The film is not displayed in 3D but the overall experience is 4D though. Touch, vision, hearing and also a odorama with smells are triggered throughout the 12 min sequence of the film. The film Paradiso is the result of a film Trilogy based on the choreographic work of Emio Greco | PC dance company (The Netherlands). This trilogy is inspired by the performances of the company produced around Dante’s trilogy of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. Each performance has been represented and reworked through three different film genres; film documentaries, short experimental films and screendance productions. The last one in this series was the installation Paradiso, a screendance film thought to be a transmedia project as film and interactive installation. The theme of Paradiso has been developed, following the ideas of the choreographers and the readings of Dante’s book. The Film is showing empty and quiet spaces, in which strong and beautiful nature surroundings are embracing a lonely body, trapped in endless landscapes of the Arctic Sea, in the deserts of Namibia, Antarctica and the Mongolian steppe. The editing built a relation of movements of the camera to the body and allowing time and space to be observed/experienced as such.
During the experience of the senses level, the visitor will sense the vibrations of the chair and the sensors within his/her body. The vibration of the chair is related to the camera movements on the film and the vibrations on the sensors are related to the body movements of the dancer in the film. Besides the vibration, smell is used through the activation of a ventilator on a moment of a scene where wind is blowing the sand of a empty beach. Thus all together, image, sound, vibrations and smell propose an immersive experience where the body is passively engaged in the actions of the film.
PARADISO’s second level - "spaces" - connects the viewer’s kinesphere to the camera of the film. Watching the dancer’s movements in the film leads the viewer into the movement of the camera’s viewing angle. In an expansion of Vertov's mental montage in early 20th century filmmaking, the viewer of PARADISO generates an interactive physical montage. In this second level, the set up is of a big screen, four sound speakers and a kinect tracking camera. The visitor enters the space and places him/herself in the center. After being calibrated the installation will start proposing instructions to the visitor. The main aim is to make the visitor understand and execute the 8 movements a camera can do, up-down, front-back, right-left and panning right and panning left. Once the movements are learned and executed, the visitor is asked to depict them from a films sequence to at the end of the experience select four movements and watch film sequences where the camera movement match the selection. This last phase could be thought as a composition or edition of films through the movements of a body. In spaces the narrativity of the film is very simple, reduced to a body standing on a landscape. The need for the simplicity enhances the focus on the movements of the camera.
Both proposals mix the complexity of technical devices and motion tracking with a very poetic and simple film proposal where movement allows the viewer to concentrate on the time, space and relationships among them within the frame.
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