LIVING SPACE

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interactive art installation

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aULkE1tMDQ

Description

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Background: by 2050, the global population will approach 10 billion, rapidly consuming finite resources and causing irreversible environmental damage.

Through the “unconscious design”, the work reveals the massive chasm between humanity’s “cognition” (our awareness of overpopulation and its consequences) and our actual “actions” (our behavior).

Its core interactive mechanism functions as an ingenious “trap”, it utilizes habitual, everyday objects. This design induces subconscious, instinctive responses from the participant. However, within the installation’s feedback loop, these seemingly natural and harmless behaviors are revealed to be incredibly destructive, for example, relentlessly consuming resources and encroaching on others’ living space merely for the sake of “continuation.”

“LIVING SPACE” is a deeply impactful, reflective work. It forces us to pause and interrogate the behavioral patterns we accept without thinking, and to reflect on their collective consequences.

Why I choose

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My core reason for choosing “LIVING SPACE” is its perfect unity of controller design and artistic theme. At the same time, through its incredibly vivid visual presentation, it forces us to directly witness the consequences of overpopulation and resource depletion.

For standard Alt+Ctrl games, player’s interaction is typically “conscious”, however, in “LIVING SPACE”, the interaction is “unconscious”, participants are driven by habit and instinct to operate the controller. This design brilliantly echoes the work’s theme, allowing the participant to unconsciously become the perpetrator.

Therefore, the controller is no longer a game tool, but a “psychological probe” revealing our inner blind spots. And this design, which transforms interaction into unconscious behavior, is what I love most about the project and is also a direction I am very interested in.