UNITY is an interactive installation created by Alberto Bonanni and presented as part of the MA Digital Direction’s final show at the Royal College of Art in London in 2020.
The project is an attempt to give life to the inherently invisible energy and electricity that we feel in clubs, raves, or other collective experiences of music featuring repetitive beats and transcendence-like experiences. Within the rave culture, such energy is often described as the overall vibration that results from each participant’s contribution with dance, moves and expression of affective states. According to situated cognition psychology, what generates is a feedback loop of ‘positive vibrations’, where the way people surrounding us respond to music influences the way we move ourselves, and vice versa, we can influence them with our moves and music acts as a catalyst to provide the overall rhythm. Party lovers call this loop ‘vibe‘.
UNITY consists in three rear projection screens applied onto a metal structure (each 2m by 1m). Each screen displays a animated avatar: the screen in the middle presents motion capture data, captured with a depth camera attached to the frame and rendered in real time with a particle system that responds to velocity. In other words, the higher the velocity, the brighter the particles. The two avatars on the sides display recordings of previous users, rendered with slightly different particle systems, presenting kinetic responses (dance moves) and relative velocity.
Near the structure, a TV screen displays velocity data captured from the user, along with the visualization of the music frequencies. Through a custom algorithm based on the Laban Weight paper (1947), tracking the aggregate of velocity data from each user’s movement, motion data can be wrapped up and sent to a sphere, affecting its size accordingly. The sphere will therefore respond to the effort – translated into velocity data – of each user’s movement, indicating the movement intensity and engagement with the music.
The comparison between the sphere’s size and music frequencies – seen below as circular waves – showcases the synchronization of our movement to music frequencies and dynamics.
Companies
Royal College of Art
- Education & Research