Angelos Floros
3D modelling and animation: Eleftherios Tastsoglou
Interactive installation, projection mapping on the building facade
Exhibited: soft RA+M — Realities Altered, Realities Emerging, Media Arts & Technology End of the Year Show 2024, SBCAST, 513 Garden Street, Santa Barbara, June 6, 2024
Guest artist, hosted by the Media Arts and Technology programme (Marcos Novak, Chair)
An aquarium standing for the internal landscape of the human mind — projected, at architectural scale, onto the facade of the building.
The premise is an old and quiet one: that in the middle of urban life there needs to exist a place given over to stillness, and that looking into water is one of the few things a person can do that turns attention inward without being told to. The slow movement of aquatic life keeps the tempo of thought rather than the tempo of the street. What the visitor is invited to contemplate, watching it, is the ebb and flow of their own thinking.
The work adds one thing to that image, and it is the thing that makes it an installation rather than a picture.
A camera watches the space in front of the building, and the head of whoever stands there is separated from its background in real time and set inside the water — so that the visitor sees themselves dipping their head into the aquarium. It stays there, among the fish, rays crossing behind it as dark silhouettes, bubbles rising from it, the sunlit sand of the bottom visible below. The self under contemplation is not a metaphor the visitor has to accept. It is their own face, submerged, on the wall in front of them, at the size of the building.
From that follows the argument the piece is actually making — that psychological well-being and our relationship with the environment are not two subjects but one. The person looking into the water is already in it.
And there is a deliberate contradiction in the staging. This is the most private act the work could ask for — introspection — carried out at the size of a building, in a street, in public. Whoever walks past sees the aquarium, and sees whoever is standing in front of it with their head inside it. Inner calm is not offered here as withdrawal from the city. It is put on the outside wall of one.
Built with Processing, using live background subtraction from a USB camera, with outdoor sound.