Understanding Echo

Opening Date: 2002-Oct-27
Closing Date: 2002-Oct-31
Understanding Echo was shown at Watershed Bristol in July 2002 and Nagoya, Japan for ISEA2002 and presented at conferences around the globe (ICA London '05, Siggraph '05 LA, Refresh Banff '05,Oslo '04/06).
Funding: DA2, Watershed Media Centre, Napier University

This work creates a theatrical and interactive installation space where poetry can be re-imagined as a part of a hypertextual universe. It attempted to synthesise aspects of cinema, video art and more primitive and associative spaces to create a narrative form based primarily in a physical environment, rather than a virtual one; rooting interactive narrative in a magical space of interaction.

In the central space of the room is a shallow circular pool of water echoing with the drip of water. Flickering in the pool is the submerged image of a woman's face. When triggered, she rises from the depths and talks slowly in short poetic fragments or aphorisms, which become ever more personal as one nears the pool. Large changing montage projections around the pool represent combinations of memory, reflecting aspects of childhood, identity and nature.

Once an audience enters the installation room they are part of the diegetic space of the narrative and are continually addressed directly or obliquely by the character of 'Echo'. There is no linear temporal curve involved. The woman inhabits the present, but lives in the past. She projects her loves and fears onto the audience, who are her blank screens.

The installation creates a responsive environment using a combination of still digital imagery and projected video clips encoded as full-screen QuickTime. A video camera and infrared sensing software, which detects audience movement within three pre-programmed zones around the central projection area, control the installation. The software used was custom written in Java and C++ by Simon Yuill (Duncan and Jordanstone)