The Vortex is an interactive installation that invites participants to look at their everyday activities from a fresh perspective. Most of the activities we do daily and eventually through our lives are banal, mundane everyday stuff that we may not necessarily even think about, if not dislike. Things like doing the dishes, folding laundry, and in this case; VACUUMING. I believe if we can find joy in doing the most mundane, we can enjoy life on a deeper level. If we are mindful of the things we do with our bodies in our spaces, time does not just fly by, it passes through us.
In this artwork, I tried to turn mundane activities like vacuuming into a fun and joyful experience and hope to invite my participants to look at their everyday, embodied activities in a new way and try to enjoy doing them. In other words, I tried to disembody the act of vacuuming and bring mindfulness, joy, and play into it hoping it would linger.
This project was the outcome of the Embodied Interaction course from Aalto’s New Media department and could not have happened without the great help of our teacher Matti Niinimäki.
I started with creating a particle system in Touch Designer, then created a vortex force and connected it’s XZ coordination to the mouse.
The best option to track an object in the space was a Vive tracker. They are originally used for VR gaming but with some modifications in the settings, we were able to use it without the VR goggles and directly in Touch Designer. The next step was to connect the coordination of my vortex force to the Vive tracker.
The next step was to project the particles on the floor and test the interactions. I started the test by connecting the Vive tracker to a stick and the magic began.