Sponge and FoAM

TGarden

The Foundation supported the development of TGarden, an interdisciplinary collaboration between Sponge in San Francisco, FoAM in Brussels, and four collaborating art and technology centres in Europe: Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam, Netherlands), c3 Center for Culture and Communication (Budapest, Hungary) and the Banff Centre for the Arts (Banff, Alberta, Canada).

"TGarden is a performance space that aims to dissolve the traditional lines between performer and spectator by creating a computational and media architecture that permits visitors to shape their overall environment through their own movements. Individual visitors are invited to wear specially designed clothing that allows their gestures to be tracked in the space. This data is compared with other visitors’ responses, and ensuing relationships are analyzed through the specially designed computer software system. Light, sound and image are then transformed according to participants’ reactions." (1)

Prototypes have been presented at several festivals and conferences around the world such as at SIGGRAPH 2000, Medi@terra (Athens, Greece), and the Dutch Electronic Art Festival, 2000 (Rotterdam, Netherlands). A new version was premiered at the Ars Electronica Festival in September 2001.

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(1) For more images and quicktime movies of the TGarden project, please see : http://www.f0.am/tgarden/