‘Lost in the FEARest’ Interactive Installation on Schmiede 2014

Lost in the FEARest is an interactive installation designed and realized by CINEMA VERTIGO team within the Schmiede festival 2014. In this project, the authors strove to explore a spooky universe, so they decided to ask the participants of the festival about their greatest fears and then visualize the most interesting of them with a pop-up book and a magic torch. Using this torch that projects shadows on the wall, the visitors of the festival could reveal a whole world with its dreadful creatures and scary trees hidden behind the white sheets of the book.

Schmiede is a 10-day festival that takes place every September in Hallein, Austria. During these days, Smiths (so called participants of the festival) get together in the old salt of Hallein to follow workshops, listen to talks and work in spontaneously assembled teams to experiment techniques, mix languages, and create something new.

The installation includes three different scenes that are closely related to the festival. They depict an imaginary trip from a forest, where the imaginary visitor got lost, to the old salt of Hallein, the building where the festival takes place, and then into its kitchen, a place where Smiths socialize during the day, but that turns into a very evocative and scary place at night.

The interesting fact about this installation is that it was conceived, prototyped and realized in only three days. The authors don’t say much about technical aspects of the work to keep some magic behind the project. We only know that the installation is a combination of different techniques, creatively combined to make hand-cutout items, 2D animations, gyroscope devices, Arduino interfaces and a complex development in vvvv (a visual programming language) interact and exchange information.