The starting point of this project was historical research about the legends and palaces of Venice. Our attention was soon caught by Ca’ Dario, because of the curse that seems to hit all the people who lived there.
At the beginning, the installation was less physical and made much use of projections. We thought to visualize the “presences” with shadows and make them interact with the users by touch. In this way people could see the garden on the other side of the wall, like a window, and find clues about the death of the owner of that shadow.
During this phase we also thought to connect together more Venetian haunted palaces, to create more interactions between users in different parts of Venice.
Developing the concept we felt the need to limit the number of users to one at a time, to reinforce the feeling of unreality. Accordingly, we thought to use an audio guide to create a direct link between the user and the installation and to use the ringing to attract the attention of the user while walking the alley. We chose an audio guide because it was easy to integrate it with the other elements already there.
We chose an object for each owner that allowed us to connect more enigmatic ally with way the “presence” and to hint to the user the cause of death of that owner.
During this phase it was important to study all the possible different behaviours of the user so we recreates the alley with a paper model.
Once we had decided the major dynamic of the installation we tried to reproduce all the different effects through small experiments. It was important to hide all the mechanisms behind them and make visible only the result, so to not give away that everything is part of an installation.
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