Angelos Floros, Vassilis Alexandrou

Presented: International Scientific Conference, June 15-16, Online/Latvia, , 2023, link

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Abstract (max. 200 words)

Happiness Relay is an installation that allows participants to be engage in personal or group performance. The project highlights the binary mode of western philosophy based on Aristotle’s theory of dualism in contradiction to Plato’s ideas of equality and dianamic balance (Liu, 2019). It underlines the violence faced by people worldwide, a steadily growing trend that intervenes as a host in people’s daily lives.

The installation welcomes visitors to a room where silence illuminates the space and noise plunges it into darkness. Their behaviour is digitised, leading participants to a regression between symmetrical environments. A microphone detects sound activity. Silence turns on the lights, when it is violated then the lights go out. The sound footprint of the space is recorded. The threshold of the microphone as a dynamic parameter determines when the disturbance condition will be applied. The algorithm trains the controller to decode the degree of order and disorder of space and adjust the threshold.

This work aims to explore the concept of stillness, confusion and happiness. Happiness Relay uses silence to monitor human stress and set a threshold for the utopian and / or dystopian environment of our time.

Keywords: (max. 5)
Binary environments, threshold, stillness, confusion, happiness