Artists Statement

Abstract
The interactive video installation “Between\Milieus” has been developed by LabInter (Interactive Interdisciplinary Laboratory) in the Graduated Program of Art and Technology at Santa Maria Federal University, Brazil. LabInter is a research and creation lab which works with interactivity environment and mobile devices to explore multimedia narratives.

Project Description
“Between\Milieus” aims to explore the interaction between bodies and milieu with interactive sensors, such as Kinect. The Kinect sensor captures the image of the spectators which shows images of the installation site. The spectators movement changes the layer of Santa Maria images as well as the layer of Hong Kong images. In between these two layers of images we can see the spectators images.

Thematic Statement
Between\Milieus is an interactive video installation produced by LabInter/UFSM that explores the acts of inhabiting a variety of mediated milieus and the movement from one to the other. Generated imagery from various spaces and temporalities hybridise themselves in a singular space and in real time, enabling interactivity between the work and the public. In this interactive video installation, images from 3 different geographical locations are overlaid on various temporalities:
— First layer: images of a milieu-location in Santa Maria, Brasil from a repository of pastness.
— Second layer: images of a milieu-location in Hong Kong from the present.
—Third layer: images from the milieu-location of exhibition awaiting actualisation by participants at a future time.
In the relation between images and milieus, we understand the image to be experience proper which inhabits the in-between me and the world; it is not produced by the subject, but rather by the image which develops within it. Thus, we consider that the work, the artist, the spectator and the milieu are mixts within the habitat as they actively incorporate parts of the world in autopoiesis, in a becoming-world. We become contaminated by the images in constant flux, by the rhythm of the milieus, by the mixture of human and nonhuman elements. We speak of the production of self and of the milieu from resonances with the living and the nonliving through processes of embodiment, of bodiesbecoming. These acts appropriate elements from their originary milieu and recontextualize them by taking them to other milieus where they acquire new meaning through associations with other elements.

Images
Video: EntreMeios LabInter

• Andréia Oliveira, Evaristo Nascimento, Fabio Almeida, Marcos Cichelero & Matheus Moreno, Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil