Swipe to Swipe To … – reflectiveinteraction.ensadlab.fr

Swipe to Swipe to …, 2023, during the event “Mεσα Στην Εικονα – Dans l’image – Inside the Image – Reenacting cinema through extended media”, Fournos Center, “Nouvelle Alphaville” Cinema, Athens, December 7-10, 2023. Photo: Ariadne Fytopoulou

Interactive dispositif for movie theaters
Samuel Bianchini, Dominique Cunin and Oussama Mubarak, 2023

At the cinema, all eyes converge on the same surface: the screen. Each person in his or her place pays attention to the progress of the film without disturbing the others, or else to share in the occasional burst of laughter or sign of fright. But almost all these viewers also have another screen with them, a smartphone. If, in this situation, it’s de rigueur to turn them off, could we, on the contrary, ask everyone to use them, not instead of the big screen, but as a complement to it?
Indeed, Swipe to Swipe to … is a dispositif that lets you switch from one screen to another, playing the film while playing with the film, in this case George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead”. From now on, connecting to the dispositif means taking part in the film. In fact, the film is divided into as many parts as there are seats in the room, and continues to unfold on the audience’s smartphones. Potentially, the whole film could thus be played out in a distributed manner on the audience’s smartphone screens, each with a part of the image, but all broadcasting the sound. Whether it’s completely emptied of its image, or only partially, the big screen won’t remain so for long, as everyone can swipe their screen in either direction to put the film back where it belongs, or, on the contrary, to bring it back to themselves. This action also plays with the film’s temporality: the film is slowed down when taken by the audience, who can then collectively restart the normal running of the film and move from one sequence to the next, restoring the various pieces of borrowed image to the big screen. Far from being just a technical gesture, this will take on its full meaning when the film we play with also raises questions about our relationships with others, and our individual and collective responsibilities, as did this famous horror film in its day, whose political interpretations caused so much ink to flow are perhaps still relevant today.

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CRÉDITS
Interactive dispositif for movie theaters
A project by Samuel Bianchini, Dominique Cunin and Oussama Mubarak, 2023
Programming: Oussama Mubarak

This project is produced in the framework of the research axis “cooperationnal Mobility” of the Reflective Interaction Group of EnsadLab, laboratory of The École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs on the occasion of the event “Mεσα Στην Εικονα – Dans l’image – Inside the Image – Reenacting cinema through extended media”, Fournos Center, “Nouvelle Alphaville” Cinema, Athens, December 7-10, 2023, with the support of the Institut français de Grèce.
The research for this work is part of the development of Mobilizing.js (www.mobilizing-js.net), a programming environment for mobile screens, created by EnsadLab for artists and designers and supported in 2023 – 2024 by the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres (PSL). This project also benefits from developments in the DOTS research program coordinated by Ircam and supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) and use the programming platform SoundWorks developed by Ircam.
Thanks to: Frédéric Bevilacqua, Sébastien Chaudat, Jean-Philippe Lambert, Benjamin Matuszewski, Christophe Pornay, Dodo et Manthos Santorinaios, Dimitris Trakas