Cooperation with Stephan Huber
Don't trust any thought that arouse while you were sitting
Maybe our suppressed love of nature took over, however Stephan Huber and I were both fascinated by the idea to give the process of thinking as we know it from walking in the forest some closer inspection. And maybe that contributed to the decision to use leaves as a metaphor for associative connections of thoughts.
Chains and Webs of Association
Information was to be reconnected by the immersive interaction of the observer. The content consisted of fragments of personal memory, depicted by typography that is parts of sentences. Being fragmented they are not interpretable in a straightforward way so it is hard if not impossible to reconstruct the original memories by the authors. But this feature on the other hand offers the potential for the observer to create connections to her own memories.
Now how did we make this work? The physical part is basically a room on the floor of which we project the fragments of sentences looking like leaves. Whenever someone walks over these words, she will recognize that the words have some physical behavior to her feet similar to those of leaves. When one stops she will realize that the colors of these "leaves" change according to their distance to the observer and the relationships among each other. This way the user gets a vague idea of the story behind these words and gets invited to associate her own maybe completely different one. You can play around with the leaves, reveal older memories that were covered by younger ones, push away the more unpleasant ones, create piles and get lost in your own thoughts. The thinking process is stimulated by the physical interaction. The creation of associative connections continues in the mind of the observer.
Immaterial User Interfaces
A video camera is the interface by which the computer tracks the position of the visitor in order to update the projection accordingly. No other sensors or buttons are necessary. When used in a well-thought-out way immaterial interfaces like this can smoothly integrate the visitor without inhibiting her by using physical interface elements.
Images
