De-interactivity

After having placed our tent with the two most 'spiritual' cords (the white Salar and the black Return) in the garden of the former convent, we created the multimedia part of the installation in a transitory part of Gerkenberg's basement. Between a former meditation room and some ateliers for the more creative monks, we hung up in a straight line the all but two cords, mounted the screens and atached the speakers.

We decided to play around a bit with the sensors and simulate interactivity. This allowed us to let more people enter the space at the same time (this was needed due to the concentration of the visitors in a very short period.

As our control room was situated next to the media space we could hear the spontaneous reactions of the visitors - real time feedback. The reaction of the first basement visitors, 2 female aboriginals: "oooooooew, these threads just smell aaaaaawfull... "

sensor set up

Also, we discovered that some visitors don't respect conventions like... staying out of 'no entry' areas. Maybe the fact that they for once could touch the expo objects gave them a sense of absolute freedom. Yes, they got themselves in a real expo-hacker-mood. We recorded this with a webcam pointed at the door and moved by my heart beat.
Title of the resulting short film: 'Q No Entras'.

ReCuerdas at Expo in Bree

As sofiesaufage's placenta is buried there, the second place where RondHangen ReCords ReCuerdas has to show up, is the Northeastern border town Bree. Not exactly Tijuana, but the site itself, Gerkenberg has its charm being a former convent filled with some male (1) spirits. After Z33, the installation hereby ends up for the 2nd time in a place with a religeous past. the Beguinage in Hasselt was inhabited by creative women during centuries (history of the Begijnen -pdf in dutch-).

We adapted the installation to the site. As the tent only can 'breath' in big spaces, it became immediately clear that it had to be put in the beautiful, big garden. Inside we hung our two most important threads: the black one (Title: Return; Material: Baby Alpaca) and the white one (Title: Salar; Material: rice bag & 10kg salt) together with two accompanying light bulbs with a black and a white electrical wire. In the convent we found a perfect simple black & white wooden bench.



The rest of the threads, the images & sounds, are placed in a corridor in the immense cellar of Gerkenberg. This narrow space is situated between a former meditation room and former 'creative ateliers'. The spiritual room revealed (besides a big wooden cross and other rather peculiar artefacts) most interestingly some white woolen threads hanging down from the ceiling... As there were a lot of visitors expected for the expo, we also decided to step away from the one-to-one idea. We removed the sensors and placed them in the control room (the rehearsal room just next to the corridor) where we simulated interactivity by controlling the sensors ourselves but this rather interesting experiment failed; we tried to use a ventilator for keeping the sensors continuously triggered hence guaranteeing a continuous pc controlled image & sound display... Somebody knows a better solution?











Concerning the Gerkenberg site it stroke us that, besides some occasional one-shot events and the provinding of some local rock bands of a small rehearsal room, the former convent is being used for... nothing. It appears to be that the government preferred to buy this place for a serious amount of money (incl. monthly interest payment) instead of letting it being transformed into an (apparently impopular) asylum for refugees.

Anyway, the installation ended up in bartaku's and sofiesaufage's places of birth. And talking about placenta, get yourself an inverted periscope & access this nice Maya legend (Spanish; used in ReCuerdas).



Checking out the site:

Webcam image of the transition area between
the 'ritual room'- with strange parafernalia-
and the former priest's 'creative spaces'.
We immediately felt we had to hang our threads here...