TRIOPIC SPECTACLE @ARS Electronica Festival 2021

About TRIOPIC SPECTACLE at Ars Electronica Festival 2021

The transmedial installation challanges the outdated, myopic, binary thinking of local/global, 1s/0s, individual/collective, real/virtual, analogue/digital, natural/artificial by creating a series of reciprocal windows, bridges, interfaces, portals and glitches between three ´triopic´domains.

Real Reality: The local space. A physical installation with haptic, robotically 3D-printed and ML-developed architectures, large-scale decorated objects that fit into the existing natural enviroment (e.g. trees) that can be experienced by ´passers-by´. They can also interact with a collaborative robotic arm that records the enviroment in real time. The resulting dataset is converted into vector information via the digital-analogue interface and digitally processed. The flucation between analogue and digital creates a glitch that results in a time delay. In this way, visitors experience the movememts that have already taken place and receive real-time feedback through a camera on the robot´s head. This step towards intuitive human-machine cooperation scenarios is referred to as ´Cobotic´.

Mixed Reality: The local VR space. A virtual, spatial, borderless, multi-user visual space that reinterprets the acanthus leaf ornament (a quintessential imitation of nature in architecture) and extends it into a space of immersive visual, haptic and acoustic experiences for ‘visitors’ with VR headsets (available on site). Here, users can also interact with the avatar of the robotic arm, which can also transcend its own technological, machine-like nature and become an integral part of the design environment. In the digital space, the visitors’ movements are processed exclusively digitally. This allows interaction with the robot in the most direct way and without time delay – a future-oriented step towards intuitive human-machine cooperation scenarios.

Virtual Reality: The global VR space. An interactive and online-based ML-developed social space (in Hubs by moz://a). This allows ‘online users’ to interact with the real and mixed real spaces of the installation in ‘Kepler’s Garden’ at Johannes Kepler University Linz, thanks to an embedded ecosystem of cameras and projectors on site and virtual cameras online. This space acts as an extended gallery and offers more information about the project, the ideas, the team and the location. Users can leave comments and feedback and actively contribute to the digital space, leaving traces in the real world on site.