ReFashion
Liljewalchs Art Gallery October 2001
As part of 'Creative Meeting Places'
Modern Museum Stockholm November 2001

Interactive media embedded into architectural and urban settings is creating new forms of mixed reality: enjoying the immediate physical nature of our built environments is blended with the ephemeral nature of animated digital media, interactive ambient sounds or kinetic events that react on the presence of the visitors.
The space becomes an active interface to information and ambience. Beyond the static notion of architectural design, spatial program and digital content start to converge into a new entity.

The idea behind the ReFashion Lab is to deliver concrete, yet provocative examples for this new thinking. A prototype, that was physical, spatial and functional, was presented at two shows in late 2001, at Liljewalchs Art Gallery and at the Modern Museum in Stockholm.

The fashion store was chosen as a thematic context, an environment that is charged with cultures of personal desire, big business, as well as artistic sensibilities. Marketing, design and social situations all play a big part in these commercial environments. This was providing a backdrop to test new scenarios of interaction between people, space and media as the core research topic.

The AudioScape is an interactive sound piece, developed together with Scanner. The music piece is continuously present in the ambience of the space, but mysteriously changing. In fact, each fashion item is virtually holding parts of the complete music track. Carrying an item in to the enabled space allows the music to unfold its own life, relating to the movement of the visitors and their choice of garment.

Antennas behind the scene are picking up specific items, and advising the system to play the corresponding sound configuration at that location, as part of a completely synchronised music piece. Four distributed loud speakers, corresponding to the location of the antennas are then producing the spatial acoustic ambience.
The project is supported by NOKIA research, KK Stiftelsen, Tomato Interactive and Scanner.

The show is sponsored by the British Council Digital Design Seminar and the Moderna Museet.

http://www.interactiveinstitute.se/refashionlab/