The Space Between Us
The Space Between Us
Space between people affect us. From the long distance relationship taking a toll on each others feelings to how the space between us on a couch dictates how close we are in our mind. Space is affected by our actions, they way we move, what we say, and how we act. Being closer does something to us. Being far apart does something to us.
My Project
I wanted to use OpenFrameworks to visualize the spaces between people and what it would do to put people closer together and further apart. The initial idea was to generate some sort of reaction whenever the humans were pushed together and some sort of reaction when they were isolated. I created a class of humans that responded by moving when the cursor came too close to their area. The cursor was connected through OSC with the app TouchOSC allowing for control through an iPad. To get the latter to work the ofxOsc addon had to be included into the project.
Thoughts
As people were interacting with the software a few interesting interactions occurred. The idea of how people would interact with it was to bring people together as the main goal, and then to experiment with bringing them apart. However the act of bringing people as far apart as possible seemed like a more worthwhile goal for most. It was also taking it to the extreme by finding bugs and flaws of the software whereas when two humans are brought together so close that they overlap perfectly they can be manipulated together - this led to some making it their mission of bringing everyone on the board together as one, something that wasn't initially thought of as an outcome.