Haunted @ MetaVilla
Life in MetaVilla
Haunted
Haunted is a “site-specific”, telematic audiovisual
installation within the French Pavilion, ResidentMeta (formerly named
as MetaVilla), 10th Venice Architecture Biennale (http://www.exyzt.net/tiki-index.php?page=ResidentMeta).
The project is commissioned by EXYZT, a French architecture group and
its main theme refers to the video game, Resident Evil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil_(video_game)).
The installation Haunted, has been formed around the different
interpretations of the word itself. The idea of virtual presence is an
obsession for “being nowhere”, a question of
believing in
the “spacelessness”, “virtual
friends” and even
ourselves. In many cultures, people believe in ghosts and spirits, it
collides the idea of believing and questions of existence. The poetics
built upon the irony. The “spacelessness” virtual
presence
creates the architecture of the installation, i.e the multiple heads
video projections and the acoustics of multichannels audio, it
challenges where is the site of project, in other words, where is the
architecture. Is the project virtual or physical, does the project
itself exist, if yes, where is it? Wvirtual friends) or the computer
itself.
The
installation will be
situated at the French Pavilion physically and a MSN (an instant
messaging service developed by Microsoft between 1999-2006, widely
known as .NET messagers) account represents its virtual presence. Once
the messager account, named as haunted_residentmeta, is online, it will
automatically update to its friend list and if someone sends it a
message, it will automatically send the sender back a message composed
of similar words via algorithmic process.
The message string will be routed, sonified and processed within
realtime processing and text-to-speech algorithm. The sound will be
presented as a 8-channels sound installation in corporate with the
acoustics inside the pavilion. Apart from above processes, its MSN
friend list account name and its received message will be visualized
via an immersive multiple-heads supported video projection. The
physical installation will be lively recorded and transferred to the
world wide web via webcam.