strisceapois

Secret Garden is a site-specific interactive installation in Venice. I developed it during my Interaction Design Lab 2 at IUAV. In order to set up Secret Garden project, first I looked for gardens all around Venice. For an entire month I was monitoring all kind of people’s experiences inside the garden (the public ones) after while I was trying to get more feelings from that kind of secret gardens behind closed doors!
Since I found a nice rounded window on the wall of one abandoned garden. For his peculiarity this last was one of the few windows I never saw and I am sure, not by chance, following his shape, someone painted it with an eye! From that moment I started working with the idea to break the wall of secret through a simply glance!

DEFINING THE PROJECT

Brief

AND WALLS HAVE EARS
Design and prototype an interactive informational installation in Venice or its Lagoon.

Function

Secret garden project raises questions about public versus private space in a urban context like Venice.
The main project’s aim is to focus on the possibility to getting enough people to partecipate in the discovery of those kind “of missing links/hidden signs” in a mysterious city like Venice. The garden is the first step in this perspective… Almost the all project works with the idea of illusion. What happens to the viewer has to be a way to catch a glipse of something. First of all a glimpse of the secret garden then…
A ghost? A monster? A fantastic object? The mirror of themselves? Let’s see…

SYSTEM DESIGN

Prototype

In order to simulate a visitor’s vision through those litlle windows spreads all over Venice, for the final prototype I used an optical box (with a web cam) where an hole was inviting to look inside. I made it using BlobDetection from Processing library and Pepper’s ghost illusion. This last is an optical effect which produces a shifting scene of real things, illusions, imaginary fancies and deceptions. That’s why through the window you can see the mirror of yoursef afterwhile, detecting your movements, the web cam gives to you the possibility to play with a “wind flower”, but…if you are so curious and you are looking too much closer…a garden monster appears!!!

Links and downloads

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