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Espanta Espritos A User-driven,Multisensorial Sculpture

Abstract

Who never whispered a secret to a wind chime, or saw

it scare off evil spirits will have the opportunity to do soon a massive scale. The Espanta Espritos is an

interactive sculpture that embodies the spiritual and

physical features of a wind chime. This piece presents

itself as a giant wind chime made out of recyclable

material, the size of a person, ready for outdoors or

indoors. People can whisper secrets to the Espanta

Espritos, and through a microphone and a camera, it

will register these secrets forever. Natural wind, or a

specially designed reactive fan, will cause the EspantaEspritos to move, and then play these recordings

through different audio effects, recreating the secret as

if said by spirits. To enhance the illusion,

phantasmagoric videos of those who whispered will be

projected on the sculpture.

Keywords

user-generated content, haptic, video, audio, sculpture,installation

ACM Classification Keywords

H5.1. Information interfaces and presentation:

Multimedia Information Systems

General Terms

Design, Human Factors, Performance

Introduction

Built during the summer of 2010, Espanta Espritos

blends haptic, visual and auditory senses with the real,

the spiritual and the virtual in one space. in its

simplicity the art work favors users input secrets and

faces and replays them, old and new, in a morphed

and sensory rich way. Although this piece uses

advanced technology, it preserves the ancient function

held by the wind chime of attracting kind spirits, thesecrets, and frightening away lurking evil spirits, the

morphed sounds. It makes the private become public,

yet unrecognizable. Constructs rich narratives from

people's secrets. Becomes wiser with time.

In its core, the goal behind Espanta Espritos is to: 1)

seamlessly unify old symbols with new media; 2)

encourage community involvement in an artistic

project; and 3) Promote sustainable design.

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).

TEI11, January 2226, 2011, Funchal, Portugal.

ACM 978-1-4503-0478-8/11/01.

Yago de Quay

FEUPR. de Mouzinho da Silveira 317 2

4050-421 Porto, Portugal

+351 966 089 603

yagostucky@gmail.com

Figure 1. Espanta Espritos

during the Future Place festival

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figure 2. User recording a new spirit in the Espanta Espritos

Sculpture

The sculpture consists of carefully selected and paintedmaterials. The symbols illustrate spiritual traditions of

various cultures from all over the world.

Interaction

From the design of the podium to the instructions on

paper, the focus was always to make something that

was intuitive. This was achieved by matching the

spiritual connotations that symbolize wind chime with

physical metaphors, for example the contact betweenthe chimes and the striker. While at the Future Places

festival, the installation collected more than 500

recordings that portray a wide range of emotions.

Video

Video recording of whisperers are replayed through a

projector and coupled with effect to add a ghost

appearance.

Sound

Sound is at the core of this piece and it provides most

of the experience. Recordings (secrets) from users are

replayed through six different modulation effects,

representing each one of the chimes. An audio

recording will never sound the same twice, and the way

random selection is coupled with user-generated

content, the reproductions are unlimited.

Technology

Powerful software and hardware ensure that the

installation is robust. Continuous information from the

podium and the wind chime travels through Phidgets to

a Max/MSP patch. Video and audio is processed in Jitter

and Ableton Live 8, respectively.

Espanta Espritos was first debuted in front of Portos

Faculty of Engineerings (FEUP) library where it was

exhibited for one week. On October 2010 it was

selected along 7 others, from over 120 international

submissions, to be exhibited for three days in the

Future Places festival.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to my colleagues at FEUP, as well as the

owners of Maus Hbitos Bar, my mother Isabel, for the

paintings and my supervisor Carlos Guedes.

References

Video description: http://wp.me/pRnGK-5Y

Wood, cardboard and papier-mch

the main materials used ensure an

that the sculpture is recyclable

Projection on the chimes and on the

wall add another dimension to the

interaction

With a click of a button, anyone can

record audio and video to the art

piece

figure 3. Careful thought was put

into the interaction design

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