TYPE: VR INSTALLATION VENUE: LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (ES) 2021
PERVASIVE EYES ASTURIAS
PERVASIVE EYES engages the inhabitants of Central Asturias in a self-centred exploration of their collective identity through social media parsing and augmented interviews. Exploring affective connections to places through the residents’ own eyes, the project exhibits a situated archive that maps the diverse nature of the region’s polycentric cultural landscape.
An initial search was conducted on the photo-sharing platform Flickr, revealing an archive of almost 260.000 posts geolocated in the area. Of these, about 30.000 posts were shared on the basis of a creative commons license also allowing for derivative work. The project uses this media collection as the raw data pool for the design of an interactive search engine developed as a VR immersive experience.
In search of alternative testimonials for the region, we travelled the area to interview a small group of older adults. These exchanges were aimed at collecting personal memories and experiential knowledge. The interviews were also augmented with the collection of Galvanic Skin Response (GSR). The signal was used to identify peak of affective connection and to extract from the narratives specific keywords to be used to search the media archive.
The results inform an immersive VR installation that, constructed as an informational space, materialises for the audience the layered narratives, uncovering thematic correlations across the metropolitan area and revealing how similar experiences might occur pervasively, cross-scale and cross-boundaries.
In its interaction with the immersive visualisation, the audience’s emotive response is monitored with the collection of live GSR signal. Working as an adaptive cognitive infrastructure that draws upon the audience’s feedback, the three-dimensional visualisation is manipulated and reorganised, exploring the performative interplay of human and synthetic agencies.
As a result, the process describes a co-evolutionary strategy that, by mapping the history of the affective interactions between the audience and the responsive environment, explores the aesthetics of embodied behavioural and decision-making patterns for spatial purposive action, describing novel strategies of performative co-creation.
Credits
A project by FLOW Architecture
Project Team: Annarita Papeschi, Vincent Nowak, Sohyun Ahn, Yusuf Ali
Soundtrack: Floating In by xname, courtesy Nebularosa Records – (C) Eleonora Oreggia 2016
Following Creative Common protocols, the project uses photographic materials and texts from the social media platform Flickr and remains licensed under an Attribution Share-alike Creative Common License.
The authors would like to warmly thank Herminio A. C., Margarita M. V., Daniel G. R., Avelino S. L. and Victoria R. M. for generously sharing with us their memories, opinions and insightful recommendations about Central Asturias.
The project is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union: European Media Art Platform (EMAP) and was firstly exhibited at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón (Spain) 24th September-27th November 2021.
Photography & Video Documentation: courtesy LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial – (C) Marcos Morilla (Installation Photography); (C) Nadia Penella (Video Documentation)
All other media: Attribution Share-alike (CC) FLOW Architecture