Software developed by INESC Porto grant holder wins Future Places Festival
Samuel van Ransbeeck, grant holder at the Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit (UTM) has designed a software for the Outhouse installation, awarded with first place at the Future Places Festival, which took place in Porto, between 13 and 17 October. This software was developed in the context of the KINETIC Project, led by INESC Porto (Carlos Guedes and Fabien Gouyon) together with the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, the University of Texas at Austin, YDreams and Casa da Música.
26th December 2009
Designed by Brian Cohen and his team from TRAX, an Australian arts company that promotes live shows and new multimedia projects, Outhouse is an application shaped like a telephone booth that works as some sort of public confessionary, where images of the people inside are recorded.
A participative research tool and interactive installation, Outhouse reverses the old concept of the phone booth by equipping it with digital technologies. Inside, the user is confronted with two choices: either he/she records a private testimony, pressing the red button, or he/she chooses to press the green button, thus risking his/her anonymity by executing a public broadcast. In this case, the information is sent to the projector outside the booth, which projects the collected images on a wall. This way, although no one sees the user, he/she is being watched.
According to the organization of the Future Places Festival, this project is innovative in the sense that it redefines the last social bastion of privacy, by playing with the notions of intimacy and exposure. Equipped with four doors, but only one exit door, this project constitutes a humoristic device, and yet a serious tool at the same time, in the sense that it can improve knowledge, the development and the preservation of a community, combining innovation, creativity, originality and digital technology.
Samuel van Ransbeek, INESC Porto grant holder, was responsible for designing the software that was integrated in this application. Music composer and programmer from Belgium, Samuel van Ransbeek is living in Portugal since 2006. He started collaborating with TRAX in 2009 by developing a new range of digital projects. After finishing his degree in Latin-Modern Languages in 2002, he studied musical theory and composition at the Lemmensinstituut in Leuven, Belgium. After that, he chose the city of Porto to carry out a Master’s Degree in Music Composition.
BIP, November 2009