DENVER.- Inside a Canadian art gallery, visitors move several, multi-colored balls around the room. As they do so, sounds emerge, creating a unique audio composition that changes with every movement of the balls and the visitors.
The exhibition, called "Tontauben," which means "clay pigeon," is the first stage of a much larger project entitled "Transduction" created by artist Marc Fournel, and relies on Smart Space technology developed by Ubisense. Tontauben opened on September 18th at OBORO in Montreal and runs until October 23, 2004.
Fournel, who is an artist-in-residence at OBORO, a contemporary art organization, has long been fascinated with location-based technologies, having created a number of previous interactive exhibits that create video and audio content by analyzing the position and the movement in space of the users.
"To offer physical elements that can be used as interfaces by a group of visitors involves them fully in the piece," says Fournel. "This simple realization was an important step in the development of my artistic reflection and has deeply influenced my work."
To create the piece, Fournel positioned four UbiSensors in the room to create a location-aware network (or Smart Space) and placed UbiTags inside five plastic balls about the size of softballs. Together, the sensors and tags provide the real-time physical positions of the balls to within 6 inches anywhere in the room. This precision location data is read by a second system, Pure Data, a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video and graphical processing, which produces the various sounds algorithms
for the exhibit.
"The ingenuity Marc has shown with his use of Ubisense is amazing and goes to show there are no limits to what one can accomplish with location-based technologies," said C. Warren Ferguson, CEO of Ubisense. "While we envisioned more business oriented applications, such as real-time locating of patients or equipment in a hospital, Marcs come up with a wonderful way to demonstrate how our physical position in the world impacts our perception of the world."
