3. DØRREN

“We live our lives in parallel to each other, all of us opening the door to something else. Experience what others might.”

- A Project by Aram Pooryousefi, Imara Bollinger & Matthias van der Waal

When we were brainstorming for this exposition, we knew early on that we wanted to do something that was airing on the side of social-criticism or at least be thought provoking. 

Hence, we came up with DØRREN. An installation in which you experience other people’s lives and environment. Prior to entering, we ask people to take a moment and then to slowly walk through the dark hallway. For each step, a door projection opens into someone’s life. At the end, just as you see your own silhouette, a projection comes up with the question “What do you open up the door to?”. The person then walks outside and is challenged to think about what they saw and how it might relate to their life.

The challenging part for this installation was two-fold: The images and the sensors. We only had limited space and consequently relatively few steps with images, this made every picture count. We had a total of 5 images, but we did not want the message to be too predictable or too preachy. That is why we had to choose carefully and why a person walking through it really had to stop for each image and think. Lastly, there were some issues with the sensors and how it interfered with the plastic. The sensors could randomly be triggered just by movement of the plastic. In the end, this was solved by creating a sluice in the code: If the first sensor had been triggered, then the second one could be triggered and so on.