Designing a Choreographic Interface During COVID-19
Lins Derry, Jordan Kruguer, Maximilian C. Mueller, Jeffrey T. Schnapp · 2022
In 2019, metaLAB (at) Harvard began work on Curatorial A(i)gents, a digital exhibition that was slated to premiere at the Harvard Art Museums’ Lightbox Gallery in 2020. Half of the projects would be interactive, using mouse and keyboard conventions. With the advent of Covid-19 and the postponement of the show, the authors set out to develop an interface solution that would enable visitors to interact with the works without having to touch any public devices like a tablet. Toward this end, we prototyped a “choreographic interface” that uses machine vision and machine learning to interpret a full-torso gestural vocabulary, which is then translated into interactions. To make the choreographic interface, we relied on open-source solutions, which have all come with equal limitations and opportunities. In 2022, Curatorial A(i)gents was presented in the Lightbox Gallery, where we had the opportunity to test and demonstrate the interface. This paper discusses our design journey in making a choreographic interface using open-source technologies during Covid-19.