Overview

If We Just Hold Still is an interactive projection we made for the April 2022 Provo Art Stroll. The Bright Building asked us to bring an interactive piece, so we took over the psych wall in their soundstage while painters and other artists showed next door in the event space.

The title comes from a line by Blaise Pascal: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." The piece rewards both moving and holding still. Move and you see yourself in it right away, pushing particles around. Sit down and watch, and you find out the thing never stops changing on its own. The motion and the colors are in constant flux whether anyone is there or not.

The Experience

Walk in and the wall is already moving: a field of particles drifting through color that shifts from purple into orange into blue. Step in front of it and your motion drags the particles with you. The first thing almost everyone did was wave, and the second thing was dance.

A few hundred people came through over the night. The part we didn't design was the best part. Watching kids play. Watching older couples dance. Watching the people on the floor watch them. That kind of emergent behavior, from the system and from the crowd, is what we keep coming back to in this kind of work. We also just wanted it to look pretty.

The Build

A Kinect v2 on a tripod between the audience and the wall watched the room. The room was dark, so instead of the color camera we used the Kinect's infrared feed, which sees fine with the lights off. Optical flow on that feed gave us a motion field, and the motion field pushed the particle system. Everything ran in TouchDesigner on one machine.

A single projector front-lit the wall from a cherry picker, high enough that nobody standing in front of it could throw a shadow. The soundtrack was a playlist of atmospheric songs we like. Nothing conceptual about it, just setting the mood.

What Else Is Possible

This is the simplest form of something we build often: a camera, a motion field, and a system that responds to it. The same setup scales from a gallery wall to the side of a building, and the particles can be anything, a brand mark, a product, a landscape. It works best somewhere people have time to linger.