Human Avatars is a media art installation that creates a visual dialogue between real and virtual participants on two networked stages: Visitors in the exhibition space discover a wooden hut, which they are invited to enter. Music (a guitar, text/song fragments and samples) is softly playing in the background. The participants sit down at a table, surrounded by the personal objects and props of an inhabited space, like letters, books, teacups etc.

A live video of the visitor is shot by a hidden camera and sent to a remote model version of the hut.

By using an optical projection trick the now small-sized participants are projected in exact proportion to the miniature room and as if they were sitting on the model furniture. Other visitors can make contact with the tiny moving figures by peeping through a small window, but are yet unaware that a small surveillance camera in the model captures their faces through the window and sends them back via a data-projector onto the window of the big shed, with their huge eyes and features suddenly overshadowing the participants inside.

The architecture and the direct visual exchange is playful, even thrilling. The shift in scale and sizes refers to the network as a representational stage - being big and small, hence outside and inside the medium. However, it could also turn out to be controversial and ironic, once the voyeuristic strategy behind the idyllic backdrop becomes evident - and the participants feel more and more observed and exposed.

The project then recalls rather ambivalent and melancholic side effects of surveillance, self-exposure and visual control, which we have come to accept as an intrinsic part of our life, and even as an entertaining part of mass media.

Contact: Andrea Zapp - zapp AT snafu.de