Transforming Durham Cathedral into a contemplative canvas through collaborative interaction with stones

Stones

Industry

Arts & Culture

Type

Interactive / Installation / Projection Mapping / Immersive

Technique

Creative Code / Real-Time Graphics / Set Design

Artichoke contacted us to present a project for Durham Lumiere Festival 2019 on the facade of Durham Cathedral. We created Stones, an interactive artwork through which people generate and control light and sound on a building by touching, indeed, stones.
As stones are the main composition of the building, it makes users feel they’re interacting with a part of it, increasing the suggestive and magic feeling of interaction. The warm touch on an element of nature makes people forget about the cold technology allowing them to focus more on the experience itself and on the dialogue they can establish with their canvas.
In our time, where all is fast and complex, we wanted to create strong memories in the brains of those who passed through this installation and encourage them to stop and start to interact with everything, simply and collaboratively.

Process

A composed generative soundtrack that constantly changes and evolves, raises through a crescendo that moves in symphony with the spirituality of the Cathedral. Through the stone controller we built, we were able to control an interactive live soundtrack mixing / morphing engine, composed to loop multiple ambient soundscapes based on numerous interchangeable layers.
For the real-time visual development, we used Notch VFX Software and D3 Media Server. We focused on using the 3D detailed Cathedral we had, deforming it to emphasize the connection with the real building, in a controlled color palette.
Our Table is built as a joint of modular pieces. This makes one stone block alone work autonomously and allows you to add as many blocks as needed. This feature lets us create different setups depending on how many people we want to interact with at the same time. Also, modular being, it makes it easy to transport and move. Each Stone block includes a black Wood Container Box of 50x50cm, Adafruit Capacitive Sensor 12-Key, Arduino UNO, Raspberry PI 3B, 2mm Wirings, and Leds.