LIGHT DISTANCE AWAY
Interactive Devices Student Project
In our current pandemic situation where loved ones cannot easily be with each other physically, our device (and setup) aims to stimulate your loved one's walking movements in your room. It seeks to highlight distant bodies through the absence of the body.
Walking around the space, one's footsteps are translated into a path of light in a distant room. In both rooms, a path generated by your loved one begins to form and a pair of shoes follow suit. Watching the shoes move, the distant movement is transported by light to the room one is currently present in. The presence of another body either haunts or comforts us through its absence represented by the shoes. The physical distance between is shortened to a lighted path as both distant bodies now move together in their respective rooms.
Ideally, our project would be an installation that is replicated in two different places across the world. Both places would look like an identical bed room, where a pair of slippers would be placed in the rooms. However, because of the space constraints and limitations in our school, we were only able to do a prototype set up where a single room is split into two and not decorated. As such, we only did one set of shoes and light projection and tracking (instead of two, one in each place). This project was done with Loh Wan Hui, Emma Cheuk and Tjoa Wei Lin.
