UN>CTRL is a collaborative project involving STRP (Spacemakers), Katpatat and a group of students, including myself. We worked together from October 2023 to April 2024, where we explored the concept of freedom and ended up making our final artwork UN>CTRL. The artwork was first exhibited at the beginning of March in Utrecht. In April the artwork was presented during STRP festival in Eindhoven. On the 28th of May, it will be exhibited again during Night of the Nerds in Eindhoven.
UN>CTRL is an interactive installation consisting of oobleck, a non-Newtonian fluid, meaning this substance is both fluid and solid at the same time. Projected onto the oobleck is an interactive game where different bubbles follow the hands of participants; when the bubbles are touched, they pop and appear somewhere else. Throughout the interaction with the work, the bubbles move towards different hands every time. Touching the oobleck can also be heard in the change of the ambiance that was being played during the expo. As people engage with the oobleck, they discover that the quicker they try to move, the more restricted their movement gets, while slow movements can be done with a lot more freedom.
CONCEPT
Our artwork embodies two perspectives on freedom. On one hand, it suggests that true freedom can be experienced by letting go of control, liberating oneself from expectations and obligations. When you try to control your movements, you will notice that you get stuck a lot easier. Whereas, when you let go of your movements, a lot more freedom is experienced, and moving becomes easier. This idea stemmed from the concept of meditation, where one lets go of all control and is able to experience what could be called "true freedom." Perhaps this is something we can integrate into our daily lives, a thought experiment that we sometimes forget amidst the busy lives we tend to lead in our everyday society.
Talking about society, this is where the second concept comes into play. Freedom is not only something that we can experience individually; it is something we share together. When one takes their freedom, it can directly influence the freedom of others. In society, we continually interact with each other's freedom through the choices we make. This concept was also portrayed in our work through the interactive animation projected onto the oobleck. Various bubbles, representing the different bubbles that we live in, move towards participants' hands. However, only two hands at a time are followed, meaning that everyone participating in the artwork will notice that their "actions" (movements in this case) determine how the bubbles move, leaving a trail of their path behind.
TECHNICAL
Throughout the project, my role centred on the development of the game projection onto the oobleck. Initially, we used colour tracking with OpenCV to track peoples hands, but encountered technical challenges. Round coloured stickers needed to be placed on the hands of participants, and those stickers were not always the right colour due to the projection that also appeared on the hands, changing the colour of the stickers. So for our second exposition during the STRP festival, we explored a way to track hands instead of colours. For this, Mediapipe was used. The data from a Python project was then sent to Unity so that all the different bubbles would move towards only two hand points at a time.