65° - 75° | Interactive installation

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Northern lights are difficult to describe.
Whenever I tried to explain the phenomenon to people arround me, it always sounded very remote from the experience these lights had immersed myself.

To nourish my project, I had to plan a trip to the most northern cities of Scandinavia in order to chase the auroras again, before they would disappear with the light of spring.

This project 65°-75° was presented in two parts for my diploma:

The first outcome is a journal that counts every step of my journey through various pieces of data:
Photographs, coordinates, weather reports, paths and road taken, and accounts of my state of mind.

More informations about the book itself here.

The second part of my project resulted in an interactive installation which invited the audience to a quest for Northern lights.
I wanted visitors to experience the same kind of feelings I had travelling around these unknown places through Sweden and Norway.
They were encouraged to find an itinerary I had drawn on an almost indecipherable map. If they managed to find my path, they could trigger light and sound pulses which were projected on curtains around them.

Throughout this “quest”, visitors had to remain silent and patient, because their voices could disrupt the lights.

In order to allow viewers to trigger projections and soundscapes, the map of my trip was sewn with touch-sensitive conductive thread.
Each thread was connected to an electronic circuitboard (Arduino) that sends messages to a computer.
These messages are scanned and converted within an audio-visual software in real time.
A microphone placed in the console captures the sound atmosphere.
The software analyses the tune and its loudness and generates appropriate perturbations onto the projection and through the sound.

The sounds used in this installation were recorded during my trips in the North, and reworked afterwards to immerse the viewer in a very special atmosphere.
The video projections are graphic translations of these sounds. It’s motion design made with After Effects.The suspended sails shape a three-dimensional space. I had to make a simulation of their volume in order to project it in two dimensions (mapping).

This precise cutting of each piece of fabric allows me to animate them independently.

The fabrics were for me the best solution to represent the softness of the aurora.
Their ability to float with the slightest breath of air translating perfectly the life which animate Northern lights.