interactive installation, in development

wood, CNC’d wood panels, motion, proximity, and tactile sensors, bedding and bedsheets, multi-channel audio, arduino LEDs

Malady is a theatrical art installation, inspired and based on the novella ‘Malady of Death’ by Marguerite Duras. In the novella, the reader/audience is addressed in the second person by a narrator, which tells the story about the unconventional sexual relationship between the you-figure, and a woman. The you-figure hires the woman to stay with him in a room near the sea. He hopes that by doing so, he will be able to experience love. During their days together, the woman confronts him that he is incapable of loving, and ultimately leaves him.

The art installation takes the text of the novella in adapted form, including the addition of the female figure’s voice. At the installation an audio piece radio play will be continuously playing, with the complete adapted text from start to finish in a resampled, stretched-out form. Whenever a participant enters the structure, motion sensors in the structure and pressure sensors on the bed transform the audio that is heard. Instead of the stretched out piece, the text gets condensed, to the point that if one lies on the bed continuously for an hour, one can listen to the entire story. Alternatively, if one comes to the installation every day for some minutes, one hears different fragments of the text in a sequential order.

The installation aims to transform participants from ‘listeners’ into theatrical audience-actors that experience the story that is being mentioned. In its ideal envisioned form, different couples, or bigger groups, can experience the text whilst being on the bed or in the room around it. And thereby question their own ideas about gender, about sexuality, about love, and about what it means to share intimacy.

First developed as a proposal for Nowhere 2017, currently being developed further and exploring opportunities.