spotlight  (With Sajid Sadi) was exhibited in the media lab and MIT museum. 2005

Spotlight is an installation of 16 interactive portraits. Each portrait has a set of 9 "temporal gestures" - photographic-quality sequences of human gestures such as "looking up". The portraits are networked, and placed in a 4X4 layout.

Every few seconds, a randomly selected portrait is looking towards a neighboring portrait. In turn, the neighboring portrait will look back. To a viewer of the installation, these "random discussions" create a sense of "social dynamics". The viewer can interrupt the group dynamics at any time, by selecting one of the 16 portraits. The remaining 15 portraits automatically react and direct their attention to the viewer-selected portrait, which reacts with a special gesture - "being the center of attention".

Spotlight is about an artist's ability to create a new meaning using the combination of interactive portraits and diptych or polyptych layouts. The mere placement of two or more portraits near each other is a known technique to create a new meaning in the viewer's mind. Spotlight takes this concept into the interactive domain, creating interactive portraits that are aware of each other's state and gesture. So not only the visual layout, but also the interaction with others creates a new meaning for the viewer. Using a combination of interaction techniques, Spotlight engages the viewer at two levels. At the group level, the viewer influences the portraits "social dynamics". At the individual level, a portrait's "temporal gestures" expose much about the subject's personality.

We make money not art blog entry

October 2005

Spotlight in SIGGRAPH 2006, August 2006 (images of installations - Sajid Sadi)