Speaking at the wall – interactive video installation by Chiara Passa (2008) – This interactive video installation synthesises the voice into virtual architecture. The spectator’s voice is recorded from a microphone and live time audio-video processed through the software Quartz Composer. Speaking at the wall develops itself on two walls and the floor. The three screenings around the corner of the three Cartesian axes reconstructs one central illusory perspective. [Quicktime Video]

While the spectator is inside the room and speaks close to the walls, he modifies with his voice (volume and spectrum) the whole environment around him. The words he pronounces draw a new atmosphere… a virtual desert. In this illusory dimension, infinite lines generating emptiness and distances are ‘attracted’ and skim one with the others, fading.

The projections reconstruct the scene of a 3-D software grid as a virtual extension in motion of the architectonic space (like an animated “tromp l’eoil” on the ‘Z’ raw co-ordinate). The environments in motion crossing the spectator lead it to an ‘unfinished space’. So the spectator is forced to confront himself with another atmosphere, a new ‘digital-where’. This dimension is by now ours, is the fourth dimension. Speaking at the wall is a virtual opening never averred, it is a process in constant transformation and therefore it doesn’t characterize any specific place.

A performance idea is the base of this artwork. Watching Speaking at the wall the spectator will see a place that moves naturally beyond its functionality. Therefore the term “Super-place” (I had invented) can be attributed to this video installation. Exactly the contrary happens in the ‘no-where’ in which static presences have only the function to receive temporarily. Speaking at the wall probes the notion of space or better of place in order to search new possibility and dimensions which the digital world, not so much separated from the real one, offers. In fact, in this installation the space is meant as the pure shape of intuition.

This three-dimensional interactive installation constructs a sort of virtual architectures and territories that elude the corporeal limits. The synthetic shape becomes design, structure, architecture and truth. If the space is the extension in all the directions by our intuitions of the real world in which material bodies are placed, Speaking at the wall wants to expand these possibilities of perception.

Technical requirements: To realize this interactive video installation developed on two walls and the floor, it is requested a room (4×6 metres.), a Mac power book (with triple-head output adaptor DVI-VGA) to be connected to three digital video projectors.