Meta-space

by Hugues Bruyere, Maxime Bergeron, & Jason Safir

Meta-space is a telematic interactive event that paints electronic shadows as raw materials into an architectural spatial form. The responsive environment explores the organic connection of human actions in an interactive collaborative environment by encouraging people to become both physical and social aspect of the participatory installation. Mapping the conceptual structures of the spectator’s identity through a boundary that separates the interior and the exterior of the meta-space, electronic casting shadows are captured and re-generated by the gestures of the user’s silhouettes onto a screen with impulsive variation. The collaborating of virtual shadows reveals how individual objects gain in symbolic meaning, while losing literal meaning, through organization, repetition and display. The division and oscillation between surfaces that conceptually separates the individual stimulates a reflection between human representations onto electronic technologies. The positioned video cameras track and respond fluidly to the user’s physical movement and output their projected image as shadows onto the surface they are intimately interacting with. The collective actions of the users contained within the cubic surroundings of the installation influence the aura of the social spaces configurations through a diffusion of light and a variation of sound. Through the physical interaction between the two social groups separated in meta-space, shadows and silhouettes overthrow the participant’s conception of representation within a public realm.