me and my shadow was an ambitious project combining motion capture and telepresence. It consisted of 4 installations situated in London, Paris, Istanbul and Brussels, which ran for two weeks in June 2012. These installations operated as online portals, connected in realtime. They gave access to a 3D shared virtual environment and allowed the simultaneous interaction of the public. Equally accessible, the ‘5th space’ of the website followed and informed the project’s development, and showed an overview of the virtual space while the installations were in operation.
The object of this work was to invite the user to interact and to communicate with both their own representation and with that of other users, in a visual and sound universe, immersive and progressive, combining motion capture (based on multiple Microsoft Kinects) and telepresence. The ‘shadows’ that users cast in the virtual space could at the same time sculpt three-dimensional objects and sound, while their movement also allowed navigation and interaction with other users. Each user was encouraged in this way to experience in realtime a true physical and ubiquitous choreographic language but also to explore new connections between the geographical, social, physical and virtual universes of these 4 places.
me and my shadow won a competitive selection process as the centrepiece of MADE (Mobility for Digital Arts in Europe), a 2 year co-operation project supported by the EU’s Culture programme (2007-2013) between lead organiser centre des arts Enghien-les-Bains (Paris, France) and partners body>data>space (London, UK), Transcultures (Mons, Belgium) and boDig (Istanbul, Turkey). Joseph Hyde’s project was selected in April 2011 by the MADE Jury, to benefit from 4 successive residencies hosted by the MADE partners in each of their countries. Funding came from the European Commission, The Arts Council of England, and several other sources. The final installations were presented in the centre des arts, the National Theatre (London), Galeries Royales Saint Hubert (Brussels) and santralistanbul (Istanbul).
Additional Notes
The MADE project culminated in a white paper, which was presented by lead author Phillippe Baudelot to the European Commission at a special event in Europe House, London, in September 2012. The white paper is still publicly available as a pdf online.
