CITY OF BARCELONA AWARD 2008. MEDIA ART CATEGORY
Concept_
Mur.muros is an interactive installation by Konic Thtr, which talks about the permanent displacement of people, their continuous mobility towards powerful geographic and geopolitical attractors. We talk about the image of an ideal world one wishes to get to, and suggest a play about utopia and dystopia, that is, the illusion to be arriving to an ideal world, and the experience of delusion, dystopia that can be perceived once this ideal world has been reached.
In Mur.muros we suggest a metaphor of this ambivalent relation between utopia and dystopia, centred in the relationship between the local and the global. Global movement in the whole world and also local, focalized in the concept of Europe.
We suggest this game of relationships and metaphors by means of interaction with the piece that take place through the participation of the visitors and the capture of the responsive sound environment that surrounds the installation Mur.muros.
Description_
The installation Mur.muros consists of an architecture that has a sensitive exterior part and a responsive interior body. Two entrances serve to communicate between interior and exterior. On the outside wall, next to the entrances, there are four little screens with microphones.
These screens show video images that remind us of the doors to the city, the utopian world, images that talk about the journey and the arrival to the place.
The small microphones catch the surrounding sound or the voices of the audience and send it to the inside of the module. The sonic stimulus puts into communication the outside and the inside of the architecture and serves as input to activate the geodesic digital world called terra_i_vida.
Based on sound inputs recollected by the microphones, artificial life properties are used to generate the representation of these inputs.
The planet earth was chosen for the representation of the data. The virtual ecosystem is built from a multiagent system of entities that move and interact in this virtual world.
The agents are created in response to sound parameters collected by the microphones. Four colours that move towards an objective set by geographical coordinates.
Awards_
October 2009. Mexico. Selected in the 3rd concourse of Electronic Arts and Video Festival TRANSITIO_MX03, National Council for Culture and Arts, and the Multimedia Centre of Mexico DF.
February 2009. Barcelona. CITY OF BARCELONA MULTIMEDIA AWARD 2008.
Exhibitions_
6 JUNE – 2 NOV 2008. Laboral. Center for Art and Industrial Creation in Gijon.
OCT. 2008 – FEB. 2009. III International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville.
13 MARCH – 23 JUNE 2009. ZKM Centre for Art & Media Karlsruhe, Germany.
Production:
Kònic Thtr
With the collaboration of:
Banquete_ Nodos y Redes
Research Institute in Artificial Intelligence (IIIA-CSIC)
Department of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia