Resurfacing:\By Ward Market

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Resurfacing: By Ward Market is an interactive new media installation. This collaboration between Ben Bogart and Donna Marie Vakalis explores new ways of understanding and conveying ideas about the interconnected aesthetic, cultural and technological agencies that shape our spatial experience of urban places.

The title "Resurfacing" simultaneously implies the form, the metaphor and the process of this project. A person can interact with the installation as viewer and agent of resurfacing, or as one being viewed and resurfaced.

A viewer approaches a touch screen mounted in a dark room. The touch screen depicts a moving image of the external scene - a crowded Byward Market intersection - captured through a small camera perched on the third story of a building. The images displayed on the touch screen exhibit a strange disjointed quality; time lapse and cinematic characteristics are fused. The viewer watches pedestrians and bar hoppers stream over the screen's surface. As the viewer touches the screen, a gradual and subtle shift occurs at the point of contact. Non-permanent figures and objects appear to dissolve and become increasingly transparent. The permanent fixtures, such as sidewalks, buildings and furniture, remain unaffected. The result of the viewer surveying and resurfacing the urban market is projected onto windows above. From the street, those surveyed can become aware of themselves being resurfaced.

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Resurfacer : Marché By est une installation interactive en nouveaux médias, fruit de la collaboration entre Ben Bogart et Donna Marie Vakalis. Ils y explorent de nouvelles façons de comprendre et de véhiculer des idées relatives aux vecteurs esthétiques, culturels et technologiques qui façonnent de manière concomitante notre expérience spatiale dans les espaces urbains.

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