Zurich-based duo of architects, Maria Smigielska and CompMonks are exhibiting a new development project on the series of mixed media installations of an analogue-digital ecosystem called Proteus. Proteus 4.0 focuses on interacting and communicating between a digitized material and humans through gaze-tracking and emotion recognition. The series has drawn from the complex behaviour of the ferrofluid material, which constantly changes its shape from dots to meandering stripes and coagulated regions through the invisible force of magnetic fields. The behaviour of the material is hard to control or simulate by nature and, as such, is taken as a value of diversity and exploration in the process of ephemeral and non-repeatable pattern generation in this generative and interactive artwork.

While former versions of the series were designing a single mode of interaction for a single physical space, the artists have now shifted to web-based interactions enacted by personal devices (personal computers, mobiles, tablets). The communication between the artwork and its beholders thus spans across the diversity of personal time dynamics and detaches itself from the walls of the museum. Embedded sensors in each of these personal devices also allow for a finer grain of face and gaze information, and a more sophisticated interaction powered by AI.

Conceived as an immersive and non-site-specific installation, it combines both the plethora of interactions happening on the web and its direct experience “on-site” with a dedicated interactive device. To extend the aesthetic vocabulary crafted across the series, this new version expresses the aspects of distribution through the design of spatially scattered displays embedded in a space frame. Individual display cells are complemented with reflexive and transparent panels across the space to render a unified spatial experience that occurs anywhere and anytime across the networked planet. Among them, one is actually interactive and enables the visitor to take an active part in it.