Bounce is an interactive installation for the gallery and project space Rabbit Rabbit in NYC. Created by SOFTlab and Davies Toews Architecture, the installation explores and blurs the boundaries between digital and physical space. The gallery’s three walls are lined with OSB displays, scraps, and offcuts from previous exhibitions in the gallery. The “pile” of physical objects creates an informal terrain along the walls for the digital shapes to navigate and interact with. Four projectors mapped to the gallery’s three walls project a physics simulation of circles and rectangles of random size and color as they interact with each other and the physical terrain.

Located in the East Village at the corner of 13^th Street and Avenue A, the inconspicuous gallery is behind a typically graffitied façade in the city. A panel with arcade buttons mounted to the exterior wall of the gallery allows passersby to add or delete shapes from the digital projection. The arcade buttons offer a tactile and fun way for visitors and passersby to interact with the installation when the gallery is closed to the public. As they press buttons to delete or add shapes pedestrians can see the changes through the two large windows and door of the gallery.  The view through the windows is meant to provide a fun, quirky, and animated surprise against the backdrop of the otherwise typically animated

sidewalks of NYC’s East Village. While this unexpected landscape of scraps and color causes many pedestrians to turn, pause, or interact with the exterior arcade buttons, the hope is that the installation also captivates people to consider what inventive and fun possibilities lie ahead as the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds become more and more ambiguous.

The projection was created with a physics engine in Processing. The original terrain configuration was mapped using computer vision and then the “tracing” was refined with custom software made with Processing. The position, rotation, color, and scale of each shape were then sent to Touch Designer using OSC to split, blend, and map the Processing sketch into four projections.

Collaborators: Davies Toews Architecture
Photos: Alan Tansey

More about the process:
Setup and software
Photos of the opening