The d.dialogue installation aims to establish an area of interaction between the dweller in an architectural space and the space itself. We will undertake to create a living space arising from the system’s learning process brought about by an exchange of experiences with the human resident. The human dweller will be faced with a digital entity that will display curiosity towards human behavior and this confrontation will arouse a mutual need to learn the space. The project ensues from a reflection based on several dualities inherent to the relation between human natural language and digital processes: dichotomies such as technological / biological, digital / analogic, inner individual / outer collective body.
Our proposal consists in creating a metaphor for the movements of convergence we have identified. The installation’s architectural space is characterized by a visual and auditive environment which prompts the convergence of human and digital realities. Through a mimetic course, typical of human learning processes, the digital residents of this space strive to learn the language and behavior of those who share it with them.
These beings are simultaneously cautious and curious in their relation to humans and demand that they in their turn learn a behavior in the shared space. From this interplay of interactive advances and retreats results a conflict, of which the expected resolution consists in a new perception of the way humans relate to a space which is alive. Thus, the ever present dualities in the project have led us to attempt the creation of a living system, a digital one but one that is fed by that which is the most human in us (word and motion).
The installation reacts in the same way as a series of living organisms which communicate among themselves and with us. Their immediate response to a human presence is flight: They show themselves later on if human activity turns out to be not too threatening; but they use the time of their flight to observe us and to learn our words. When they return the words of humans are already part of their memory and are changed in their attempt to provide us with an answer based on a shared communication platform. Motion in space is no longer intrinsic to us and becomes external; in the same way do our words become a part of the environment.
The basic conceptual challenge for the project consists in driving communication and starting a dialogue involving the visitor, the environment and the digital beings.
For such a dialogue to happen we must establish a modular synthesis computer system and relate it with an electronic control system using led lights.
The computer operates though three information processing units: an input unit which allows the system to detect and interpret a visitor’s presence, a synthesis unit where analysis is performed and relation commands are attributed to information, and an output unit which leads the sound synthesis and the relevant commands to the electronic interface.
The electronic system gathers the data from the output module and assumes command of the led lights’ intensity and pulse.