Urban Transmutations is a multi-sensory interactive multimedia installation. At the center of the work is the physical concept of movement, interpreted and rendered concretely from a playful perspective. The basic idea is to convert the smallest and most imperceptible vibrations felt in the location hosting this work – Independence Square – into sounds and images projected onto the Civic Tower, through videomapping. The vibrations are caused by the touch, of any intensity, caused by the moving and acting of the public on the square; it is detected by contact microphones installed at different points of the widening, and later sent to the director, who transforms it into mapped images. The physical essence of vibration encompasses that of sound: the sounds that accompany the videomapping are thus simply a broader and more explicit manifestation of what happens at the scientific level when we step on the ground.
The most explicit character of the work is multisensory; in fact, it involves various perceptual fields: touch, and the sound vibration, inaudible to the human ear, caused by touch itself, are the inputs that stimulate the whole mechanism; the impulses are re-presented mutated into images and sound, and in this way they are grasped through the senses of hearing and sight. It is interesting to note the fluidity with which one sense and then another is involved, with an almost total involvement of the most basic sensations of human and animal nature.
For the installation to work, the presence of the passersby in the area where the event takes place is absolutely necessary. The user is indispensable, although the user does not directly notice: his or her slightest movements, the seemingly insignificant vibrations of the square, represent inexhaustible inputs. Unconscious gestures, such as the mere movement of people, trigger the showing and activation of the artwork. Action on the part of the audience is configured as involuntary, thus entirely random, with unpredictable effects. People are only required to experience the place and have a new and amplified experience of it. The artwork comes to life with the very life of those who use it. Space is given here to the natural and spontaneous gesture, nurtured by the playful context, capable of bringing back an authentic behavior, linked to the unconscious and childhood; the return to childhood is also fostered by the use of the most primitive mode of learning, the sensory one, proper to the child.
