mariano sardón

"a = b" at "Variations on the Museum: remembering, ordering, classifying" Exhibition.
Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires. MALBA.
Technological collaboration: Laurence Bender.
2003.

a = b is an installation in which people’s movement in the Museum interact with texts stored in a database. People’s trajectories of movements in a certain region of the Museum are transformed into paths of characters and words that mimic their comings and goings into a text structure. The letters representing individuals’ paths are dynamically etched from text stored in the database and projected.

People are embedded in an immersive environment constituted by a chain of processes allowed by digital technology. Person’s movement is captured by a tracking system with a video camera (computer vision). Their position coordinates are transmitted to another computer via the Internet which deals with the texts that are projected in real time.

a = b attempts to cross out the defined border between the artwork as a defined object and persons who experiences it. It’s a work conceived as an unfinished “system” related to space and people. Its shape is taken according to the people’s interaction as party. Persons do not have complete control on the texts triggered; their reading and perception depends on the others ones. Accordingly, texts are altered and created by a common construction achieved with others who uses the system as medium.

The resulting projected movement patterns can be seen as an illustration of the tensions between the people’s paths constrained by the building and the movement altered by the play proposed by the artwork. This is the fundamental source of the unforeseeable dynamics of texts.

The texts stored into the computers are hidden. Action (walking, movement) determines (or seeks in vain for) the plot, which if found does not produce anything, only (barely) closure.