University of Leeds | s. d.palmer@leeds.ac.uk
University of Leeds | s.popat@leeds.ac.uk
How do you transform a city center at night to enhance the experience of residents and visitors and to combat the public’s fears over safety and security after dark?
This challenge was set by the York City Council’s “Renaissance Project: Illuminating York,” and we took them up on it. We made it our goal to get pedestrians to engage with our interactive light installation—and to get them dancing without even realizing it.
People out shopping or on their way to restaurants and nightclubs found themselves followed by ghostly footprints, chased by brightly colored butterflies, playing football with balls of light, or linked together by a “cat’s cradle” of colored lines. As they moved within the light projections, participants found that they were literally dancing in the streets!
Picture a small square, enclosed on three sides by the brick walls of buildings and on the fourth by Davygate, a narrow, ancient street within the old city walls of York. The square is a largely forgotten place that appears to have little function in the modern city. Davygate itself is a historic thoroughfare in a busy commercial area, close to the Parliament Street market. It is home to
small department stores, cafes, bookstores, and up-market clothes shops.
The square, like an empty stage, looks like one of the many bombed-out spaces found in postwar British cities. One can almost imagine a noble building once standing in the space, set back from the road and raised above road level by three steps. The enclosure and height combine to ensure that it is largely bypassed by those traveling along Davygate itself, yet the open floor seems to invite a sense of display.
The location is intriguing, as it was almost like a vacuum in the busy city center. The potential that this creates is such that mounting the few steps up to the square has a more distancing effect than stepping off the road into a shop or onto another street. We recognized the transformative potential that this space had for engaging people with interactive artwork, since it felt removed from everyday life and could potentially “authorize” different behaviors as a result [ 1]. If people were going to dance anywhere in the streets of York, here was a likely place.
Our team, made up of Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler from KMA Creative Technology Ltd. and ourselves from the University of Leeds, created a relatively simple technical infra-
structure. A thermal-imaging camera misappropriated from the military was used as the input device to sense the bodies in the square. Digital images were then processed and sent to a projector, which was also perched high above the ground to create constantly moving projected light onto the surface of the square. This imagery was designed to respond directly to the movement of people who might enter the space. The challenge was to entice them into this flag-stoned square with its four iron benches, two trees, and two square planters. It is not an inviting space and is consequently largely neglected by the local population and tourists alike. The square doesn’t even register on many of the modern maps of York City Centre.
On our first evening of installation, we waited until darkness and then turned on the projected light, which we hoped would entice the public into the square. Those walking by stopped to stare, and a few began to interact with the space, timidly walking between the lights.
The installation capitalized on immediate, intuitive body/ movement responses to light and space. Users quickly established that the lights were following them, although often they did
[ 1] De Certeau, M. The Practice of Everyday Life. 135-136. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
May + June 2008
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