Yesterday's Company - Conceptual Installation

For this concept assignment we were asked to create an interactive experience that one would find themselves in/interacting with without them knowing that they would be doing so.

After giving it a lot of thought I remembered something we saw last year while visiting the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Liliana Porter's Untitled (shadows) , which was an installation on painted shadows of people that looked real and believable like there should actually be a person standing there creating it.

Here is a link to a video where she talks about the piece. Anyways I thought this installation was so cool, and had a sense of mystery to it while also creating a sense of not being alone. So using that as inspiration I came up with the concept for Yesterday's Company.

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Yesterday's Company

I first imagined this on the skybridge that connects Copley Place and the Prudential Center in Boston, but any skybridge or long hall of a city building that is used often. Large white screened monitors would line a wall and on it would be the recorded silhouettes of the people who walked through the hallway at the same exact time yesterday. Each day the piece would make a new recording and update the wall to be the recording from the day prior.

I think that this piece would really push the ideas of people, space, and time. The silhouettes being live recordings make it interactive and it would feel alive. I think just like how I felt mystery and a sense of not being alone from Liliana's piece that many people would feel that even more so with the liveliness of this. Instead of being a still, modelled , painting, these silhouettes would be silhouettes of real people moving and I think that would give it a whole different energy. Even if people didn't know it was the people from yesterday walking there at the exact same time as today, I still think they would feel those feelings more intensely. Maybe they would even recognize themselves in it if it is a place they walk daily. People who would walk it daily might even do something so they can more easily recognize themselves more easily the next day. As people figure out what it is they may try to use it as a way to send a message like making a heart with their hands , waving to a person in the future, or just doing something crazy like swinging their arms around so the person who sees it tomorrow would be like "what the heck were they doing?" and maybe spread laughter, joy, and fun in that way. Anothering interesting thing would be if people changed their paces based off of the paces of the silhouettes on the screen, like if they try to match the pace of the silhouette besides them or walk faster, etc.

Overall, I think this would be a very interesting piece to present to the public, I think regardless of what they choose to do just seeing it will get them thinking about other time, space and other people. Who is that man with a hat? I wonder what kind of dog that lady was walking? Or they won't care, but I still think everyone would feel that presence of others being there, of time just going on, humans repeating their daily rituals every 24 hours and even if they don't pursue it, that sense of mystery and wonder.