Interactive Bed Notes

Audience experience

You are invited to lie down on a bed. There is a dim red light, and curtains shield you from others. A screen above you displays a projected video image with a simple icon that mirrors your position on the bed: left, center or right.

Your presence on the bed has triggered music and text, wich you can change by moving around, like switching radio stations. Soon images appear, and they too can be changed by your position, like television stations.

Your movements on the bed create a polylinear movie that tells the story of a broken couple, you can switch between the images and sounds of the man or the woman on either side of the bed, and two arbitrating "muses" in the middle.

After several minutes, the video stops, then the audio. The ride is over, and will start again when someone lies upon the bed.

Theme

The polylinear movie evokes the dreams of a man after a break-up with a woman. The polylinear structure, heightened with restlessness, has a dreamlike quality reinforced by the music and text. The viewpoints of the man and the woman alternate, and two playful muses comment, arbitrate and mock the estranged lovers, bringing a little lightness and humor to the mourning of lost love.

Design

Most couples quickly define a his and hers side of the bed. We start with this ingrained habit to map out the bed in three vertical slices: the man, the muses and the woman.

The structure of the poly-linear movie can be compared to a slot machine with a window that moves back and forth between the three wheels. However the wheels are of different diameters, so the sequences in parallel will be different each time you go on the bed.

Technology

A video camera detects the motion of the person on the bed. The video projector is shined into a mirror that shines on to the screen. Two laser videodisc players with the same video footage are used to provide different audio and video transitions, (the audio is dissolved, the video cut). A Mac computer controls the entire system.