"Petite Poucette", an artistic, digital journey through Amiens city
Project
The installations designed by studio 2Roqs proposed visitors a journey through the St Maurice district where they could collect a number of words quoted from Michel Serres's book. All those with a smartphone or a tablet could participate in a collective work of digital art.
The exhibition involved three major entities to interact with :
➔ a quest for digitally printed paved stones
➔ a video-projected visualization at ESAD school
➔ a light installation at the ancient hydroelectric plant
The journey
A set of digitally printed patterns made of concrete slabs, plus one floating wooden slab, was distributed through the St Michel district. Each place displayed two words quoted from "Petite Poucette", that bystanders were invited to use inside a sentence of their own that they could text to a given phone number. Thanks to a mobile app (available on iPhones and Android phones), they could watch the message sent to this place by previous participants, with an augmented reality animated effect. Those messages were then transmitted to the ESAD's video)projection and the hydroelectric station for display.
The light sculpture at the hydroelectric station
Standing above the water, the discarded hydroelectric station placed at the entrance of the district evoked to us a lighthouse — this is how we envisioned its function when we imagined to pull back electricity in its walls and lit it powerfully from the inside.
The messages collected during the day were broadcasted live through the windows thanks to a slightly cryptic, pixelated typography designed for the occasion.
Construction
For this event, we teamed up with light artist Stéphane Bottard, who came up with a massive set of 12 wooden racks which were lifted onto the windows frames. 144 halogen lights were mounted behind each little window in order to display the pixelated messages.
Applied on both sides of the building, the installation was literally pouring showers of light throughout the insides of the plant.
The typographic code
A typeface has been designed to match the sequence of the hydroelectric station's windows. Therefore, each letter was coded inside a matrix of 3 by 2 pixels.
This typeface, used on the printed slabs as well as on the video-projected animation, has permeated the entire installation to remind its digitally-inspired substance.
Projection at the Amiens' ESAD
Inside ESAD was projected the collective work of art. Messages written during the journey were animated in real time in the exhibition room, while visitors could manipulate the touch screen to browse the typographic structure and recover the texts they had send.
Depending on the specific words it contained, this textual matter constantly dialogued with the set of quotes taken from "Petite Poucette" book.
Resources
Web site : poucette.info
