4.4 Return - Interactive 'Where Was I..?'
Last year, as part of our 4.4 module, specifically the second task - video, i created a pseudo adaptation of my zine - 'Where Was I..?' - a strange and mysterious look into the unnatural repetition that can be found all around us, but with the specific focus on Terraced housing around the Hyde Park area of Leeds, and specifically student housing. The video version however, was an adaptation using the original images captured for the book, along with elements inspired by the wonderful work of @drezzdon on Instagram.
Here is a great example of the really interesting work that Drezzdon creates and uploads on his Instagram page. I love the hallucinogenic yet romantic feeling of the posts, the feel for which i tried to be inspired by and replicate with my "Where Was I..?" video.
Below i have linked to his website, in which footage of the immersive experience that was held late 2024 in America. The experience took the general feel of the videos and replicated it on a much larger screen, with a central area with bean bags and other seating for attendees to relax and simply get lost within the work.
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This would be again, the inspiration for my own design, a room with 4 big screens / projections, featuring extended and refined versions of my original video, delving deeper and deeper into an infinite maze of doorways. What would make the idea more advanced based on the topics we discussed throughout the week, my idea would be to have a large amount of user interactivity and control. Visitors would be able to connect to the exhibition with their phones, allowing them to write and design red elements to appear on a screen the next time the doorways took a pause, like in the original video. Other ideas could be to allow visitors to control the speed of the movement, going faster or slower through each doorway depending on what the visitor wants. If the videos are projected rather than just shown on screens, there could be actual doorways sat where the doors appear on the projection, in which visitors could go through to get to different areas of the installation, food stands etc.
The room itself could act as 1 unit rather than 4, where in which the four walls represent four options for travelling, rather than each wall moving forward separately. Users of the phone service can vote amongst themselves in which direction they take at each step. North south east or west. Different pathways could lead to humorous or mysterious places that people can eventually stumble across after navigating the maze. I feel like either of these options would have enhanced the main theme of the initial zine and its video, and would have allowed for a more in depth and spine tingling experience.
In future, if i create video projects again, i may decide to incorporate these such elements into the base idea and creation. Rather than just making a video, make a video made to be a part of an installation / exhibit. I could even do this physically in future, as i own a very rudimentary projector, i would just need to learn how to set this up properly, along with getting better at after effects to more accurately take my initial concepts and create them, to a point where there aren't glaring flaws, at least none that aren't just obvious to me.