Finishing the interviews
As we had to find dates where our actors had time to make the interviews, this unexpectedly didn’t work out in the reading week so it had to be done in the final week. Carlo actually drove all the way to Basel to interview his friend. And one of the actresses didn’t want to do it anymore so we switched her out for an actor. When everything was filmed, Daniel Holler and Ismael Möri teamed up to translate them and make the subtitles.
Planning the Installation
Somewhere along the way it was proposed to us, that the installation should not just be our object on sockets like a museum, but rather be interactive. Since the original idea was to just make a model of the room, so just the concept, we never thought much about what the room should do when we decided to make one. We thought it would just be objects on sockets. Now that we decided to make more out of it we had to organize and decide very quickly.
We had the idea of automating the whole installation, thus guiding the visitors from one station to another. This would be done by mapped beamer projections and everything had to go by timing.
Starting the Website
Since we decided that we could not capture the room in a video we decided to make a website for it. This would give us the opportunity to explain what is behind the objects, phases and all.
The Night Before the Presentation
Like all good projects, this one too required one night without sleep. It was the Night before the presentation and our extended goal of an automated room gave us a lot more to do than we initially planned to. For the last night we split up the group in four. Everyone was working on another aspect of the room. I finished the website from a technical point of view, Daniel Holler wrote the texts for them, Ismael Möri did the mapping and Carlo did all the small things that piled up. Since we didn’t have the infrastructure to have the whole room automated centrally we had to make eight separate videos, four for the mappings and four for the interviews. We had to start them all at the same time and have them repeat themselves. You can imagine how much tricky it was to do it that way. Especially at three in the morning. As the sun came up we where finished with the Room and everything was working as expected. Ismael and I made the finishing touches while Carlo and Dani went to get a little bit of sleep and after a while I too went home to get an hour of rest. ! Ismael Working on The Mapping
Final Thoughts and Reflection
The installation can be seen on [it’s documentation page] (http://www.tobens.com/documentation) While on first sight the installation was really nice and I thing it was clear how much work went in to it I think it’s weak point is the fact that it is something between and installation and the research room we wanted to do in the beginning. The actual phases and the research that we wanted to do with it was overshadowed by the installation character it had in the end. Nevertheless we where very proud of what we achieved and definitively learn a lot during the process. Last but not least I found it surprising that we could profit from every single step we went trough. The End-result really was the product of all the methods we used in the process.