“Where are you?
An immersive existence simulator and telepresence apparatus.

In Where are you? visitors are invited to fly, as in dreams, through a world of many dimensions, between past and future, light and darkness, the public and private. The immersed visitors use a joystick to move in the X, Y and Z axis of an
information/experience space where scale matters.

At scale 0, the world looks like a simple XYZ grid defining the experience of the navigable space. At scale +1, the world turns into an archive of pictures, sounds, texts and objects (the author’s). Zooming out at scale +2, elements of this archive become particles in a “molecular” world of self-organizing clouds of lights reminiscent of late 19th century impressionistic views of the world and of a nascent abstraction. Zooming yet further out at scale +3 reveals a sublime landscape of mountains and valleys in tune with the 18th century idea of the picturesque.

At all these scales, visitors will encounter other inhabitants: live ones through telepresence links (if activated), pre-recorded subjects in video windows and, ultimately, themselves when hidden cameras transmit their own image in this constructed world. In Where are you? the subject (visitor, actor, protagonist) controls his/her position, the path and speed of his/her journey and, more interestingly perhaps, the scale at which he/she is prepared to “exist”.”

General concept, design, scenario, direction, production:
Luc Courchesne

Software design, contents modeling and integration:
Guillaume Langlois

Support credits:
Music, sound design, 3D audio systems: Luc Martinez

Lens design:
D'nardo Colucci, The Elumenati
Simon Thibault, Immervision

Collaboration to screen design and fabrication:
Sébastien Bire, Sébastien Dallaire

Created with support from:
Society for Arts and Technology (SAT)
Université de Montréal
Idéaction inc.

Thanks to:
Pierre-François Ouellette Art Contemporain
Hexagram