Digital Spaces (working title) is a practice-as-research, work in progress installation, shown in December 2012, exploring the relationships between audience, protagonist and technology

In amongst this mix of digital content are the real life encounters/memories of ‘the User’ – the fictional character whose digital and actual past experiences you are exploring. In walking the space to find these real encounters/memories – mundane and quotidian as they might seem – you will unlock further pathways and ‘mediascapes’, new memories and more digital encounters. Each journey has many forks in the road and every journey will be different depending on which memories and paths you tread.

In a one-on-one setting, the audience is tracked by overhead cameras and their movements transcoded into in a new digital landscape. Within the demarcated actual space, the user may explore and wander in and out of the virtual media ‘zones’ simultaneously, bringing new media into view. In finding the key circular zones, containing the real encounters/memories of ‘The User’, the audience is able to progress through the many paths of this virtual landscape.

How did this project use Max?

Max was used from the ground up to create a number of distinct modules to work in parallel to dispose an interactive and dynamic system for exploring digital media via actual space. The work uses three systems: 1. a decision tracking structure that facilitates the disposition of media in an intelligent and responsive way allowing users to have their own personal, unique journeys through the inter-connecting mediascape. 2. the camera tracking (kinect) system translating the users real location into that of the virtual environment and 3. the media mapping control section which allows different media to be loaded and blended in relation to zones in the mapped out media scape (using nodes object).