WINDOW 窗

An Interactive Multimedia Installation on Quarantine Memory and Dream

Lead Artist: Anna Borou Yu
3D Artist: Jiajian Min
Creative Design Director: Amo (Mengying) Zeng
Year: 2022

2022 Chinese CHI Art Gallery Third Prize, 2022 Chinagraph Electronic Theater Best Visual Effect Third Prize,

2022 Lumen Prize BCS Immersive Environment Award Longlist, 2022 ACM Siggraph Asia Art Gallery, Shenzhen MoCAUP Light

Window is an interactive multimedia installation that reconstructs the Quarantine environment of the artist Borou Yu from the US to China, introducing the audience into the artist’s memory and dreams. While the room was the container of the physical body, the window became the metaphor of hope, spirit and imagination to the outer world. The use of point clouds, sound, texts and the aesthetics of transparency and vanishing delineate the space, which is the representation of the mental projection. With Kinect depth camera, projector and speakers, the project developed an interaction system where the audience would immerse into the soundscape and ocean of texts from the monologue written during the quarantine periods. Window aims to create a poetic digital experience, arouse the audience's empathetic feeling together with the artist during the pandemic, and reflect on the relationship between body and space, the individual and the universe, the physical and the spiritual.

There are three different media inputs, the space, the text and the sound. The space of four different rooms in Boston, Tianjin and Changchun were 3D scanned by Iphone Polycam software and exported to Unity as point clouds. The texts are from the diary written by Borou during her quarantine time. And the sound includes recording of exterior sounds from the windows, the monologue, as well as sound effects generated from point cloud images by Melobytes. The overall interactive experience is created in Unity3D. The Morphing Effects between rooms are achieved by Unity Asset FM POINTS. And the interactive contour is implemented by blob detection technique with Kinect. For onsite installation, a 4K short throw projector, kinect 2, Laptop and two speakers will be provided to create a multimedia interactive environment. The projection screen is another window that links the audience with the artist.