M3 (TGarden)

TGarden Installation V2
image/jpeg
1536 × 2048

TGarden Installation V2
image/jpeg
2048 × 1536

TGarden Installation V2
image/jpeg
2048 × 1536

TGarden Installation V2
image/jpeg
2048 × 1536

TGarden Installation V2
image/jpeg
2048 × 1536

TGarden Installation V2
image/jpeg
2048 × 1536

Salter Chris
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320 × 240

Salter Chris
image/jpeg
320 × 240

Salter Chris
image/jpeg
320 × 240

TGarden is a responsive media environment in which small groups of participants from the general public influenced and played with real-time-generated sound and image through improvised movement and gesture. Visitors to the environment —which consists of a completely enclosed space without an audience— chose and wear sensor-embedded clothing that enabled them to “play” the room as a real-time media instrument based on individual as well as group movement patterns. The clothing or costumes are designed with unusual properties, including uncommon materials (plastic tubing, springs, wire, crinkled, oversized organza) and exaggerated proportions organized to defamiliarize the visitor’s relationships to their own bodies, while the room’s media output consisted of projected images on the floor which depict biological forms and their reactive mutations and multichannel, spatialized audio. Through worn sensing and wireless communication, spontaneous gestures and movement of the participants are tracked and analyzed in real time by a network of computers. Thus, free improvisation and collective play enables the transformation of the environment in real time.

TGarden emerged from an ongoing discussion between sponge and FoAM about the development of technologically (computationally) augmented fluid environments that emphasize social play between people and help catalyze new ways of making meaning. How long and how intensely can people play with one another inside a hybrid environment when they don't have hard, fast rules and can improvise everything: their voice, gesture and body? How do social conventions of play drive experience?

The installation version of TGarden functions as a temporary event; a new type of play zone. Since the project challenges existing modes of disembodied interaction, TGarden as a public event aims not only to give people a compelling, physically responsive experience, but also to serve as a real world laboratory to test out new developing technologies that may come about and be developed as a result of direct audience / visitor / participant feedback.