Claire Lee – Looking Outwards – 01

Cell by Keiichi Matsuda and James Alliban is an interactive art installation that uses Xbox Kinect technology to trace viewers across the screen by adding tags taken from social media to their form, until their entire screen “self” is comprised of lines of text that seem to simultaneously represent everything and nothing at all. I found this project to be fascinating because of its technological advancement in the interactive art field and its piercing social commentary.

The piece provokes a lot of thought about how we construct our sense of self in the new digital world. It seems to be asking the question: do we put ourselves into social media, or does social media put itself into us?

In collaboration with Microsoft and the openFrameworks community, the creators of this installation pioneered a new method of making interactive displays by building a new code library that supports Kinect for Windows. This code is on an open-source platform, so it is bound to inspire many future projects as well.