Spatial Matters

This interactive installation was created by a group of students in my Media Arts and Spatial Practices course at the Hartford Art School. The students built furniture; scripted and shot video; used projection mapping in Pure Data and GEM to project onto the furniture; and embedded sensors in the couch to activate the video in response to the viewer’s presence.

Student artist statement:

In the collaborative installation exhibited, life is distilled from its everyday environment, here in the living room. To watch Family Matters, or any other sitcom, is a dialectical battle between a screen and its perceived depth.  Sitcoms offer us examples of real family relationships, with which we empathize and simultaneously reenact while watching. Of course, this simulated space is far from foreign to us, for we have experienced the lifeless living room for decades; mirroring the very space we observe it from.

What we offer the viewer is a stripped down version of the stereotypical domestic space.  We reversed the intentions of the sitcom, which were originally used to convey humility, morals, and humor within the family context using techniques such as canned laughter, characterization, hard editing, etc.  The overt manipulation of our self image has managed to infiltrate the tableau it has been mirroring, creating a discord between reality and the virtual.   This installation reveals the unreality of the idealized living space. Through exaggeration in our created space the viewer assumes a removed stance towards our projections and interactive media, floating like a specter among sitcom vernacular.