Passage Park #4: A Hotspot Shack is a site-specific installation. A simple wooden lightweight construction box is entirely covered with inkjet prints on the outside. While in Passage Park #2 a cargo container was used as an icon of 'being en route', the built space of Passage Park #4 is a shack: image of a fictitious temporary accomodation and a short stop on a journey. This is a metaphor we can also find in the narrations of many computer games.
Visitors access the shack through a narrow roofed entrace on the side. Inside of the dark space the current stage (#4) of Passage Park is projected. For this level of the interactive projection we have expanded the data pool of 3D objects with new elements which relate to the inside/outside motif of the installation: scaffolds, construction sites, curtains, and of course parts of the shack itself.
Passage Park consists of several different interactive scenes. They are linked through a common interface but can be displayed independently.
The moving images of the scenes are not retrieved from a DVD player or a media server, but rendered on a PC computer. This results in scenes that are not mere video recordings, instead they are 3D realtime images, which are not limited in time, and have a programmed camera behaviour and user interaction we write individually for each scene.
Photographs and objects are selected from a stock and placed in the scene at random. These objects are placed on different levels and may overlap and/or intersect. We don't want to create an arrangement of objects that could be found in reality but a mixture that induces an atmosphere of the viewer passing by surrealistic spatial situations.
While the first person camera is moving automatically through the 3D objects and photos, the vistor can use the mouse to look around.
Clicking the mouse will change the light situation: Without pressing the mouse button the user will see just what lies directly in front of them within the narrow beam of a searchlight; when the mouse button is held down the scenery is openly displayed in a bright, vivid ambient light.
The photographs however, which formed the contours of the location characteristics in the dark scene, vanish in the bright light, leaving nothing but a random composed combination of scattered 3D objects.