April 18, 2011

New art installation at the library

By Donna Livingstone

On Tuesday, April 19, at 5:30 p.m., Lindsay MacDonald will present her interactive installation, A Delicate Agreement on the main floor of the Taylor Family Digital Library. A public reception and artist talk will take place in the lobby.

“Elevators are awkward spaces,” says MacDonald, a master’s student in computational media design at the University of Calgary. “There are unspoken rules about what behaviour is acceptable while riding with a stranger. If these rules are broken, the remainder of the elevator ride becomes unbelievably uncomfortable. If a stranger casts their gaze in any direction other than towards the doors, this can threaten the delicate agreement that tacitly exists between the occupants of the elevator, turning the mood into an emotional pressure cooker.”

A Delicate Agreement is a gaze-triggered interactive installation that explores this concept. It is a set of elevator doors with a peephole in either side that entices viewers to peer inside and observe an animation of the passengers. Each elevator passenger, or character, has a programmed personality that enables them to act and react to the other characters’ behaviour and the viewers’ gaze. The result is the emergence of a rich interactive narrative made up of encounters between the characters.

For further information, visit: http://lindsaymacdonald.net/index.php?/interactive/a-delicate-agreement/