Outdoor Inhouse
Outdoor Inhouse was an in-house (ha) installation created by Intermedio Studios in 2016 to simulate the almost forgotten act of relieving oneself outside, but in a public bathroom. Motion sensors detected when someone entered a bathroom stall, and then played a field recording taken from outside an actual outhouse in rural Ohio. The installation was meant to target “the controlled, plastic quality of contemporary elimination and it’s isolation from natural environments, while referencing a recently abandoned architectural staple of daily life prior to indoor plumbing.”
I was drawn to this project because it is almost entirely opposite to a typical work of media architecture, which tends to invoke High Art and High Tech. Outdoor Inhouse forces participants to reexamine a mundane act of everyday life in a location where the average person is not “primed” to experience a work of media.
SUN
SUN was a project created by Dutch artist Philip Schutte as a playful exercise in self-generated landscapes. Sensors capture the movement of a giant ball controlled by the user, and reflect and distort light through the “atmosphere” backdrop based on the ball’s relative position to the horizon.
I particularly like SUN because of the artist’s fascination with world-building. According to the an interview in the Creative Applications blog, Schuette was inspired by rendering algorithms for world generation in a video game. Because the position of the sun has such a powerful emotional effect on people, the ability to move the sun and alter the emotional landscape of a scene is a way for the user to create a personalized emotive environment.