The Year In Lists: Best Interactive Installations 2011

As another year comes to a close, it’s time to look back with a wistful gaze and reminisce about all that 2011 had to offer. It’s fair to say it’s been bountiful, with a smorgasbord of delights coming at us from galleries, computer screens, installations, and catwalks encompassing all sorts of styles across a whole range of disciplines. To honor our favs we’ll be rolling out a list a day all week.

Today is Best Interactive Installations, followed by our last list, Best Kinect Hacks, on Friday. Check out the week’s previous lists on Best Animation/Motion Graphics, Best Music Videos and Most Futuristic Fashions.

In addition to our curated picks, we want to hear your suggestions, which you can submit via the comments section below, or hit us up on Facebook, Twitter or email: editor@thecreatorsproject.com. We’ll take your recommendations into account and each category will call out a special “People’s Choice” winner based on the most-recommended work.

Interactive installations are becoming more and more ambitious and mind-blowing, with artists exploring all avenues to make art works that are utilizing our online lives, are colossal in scale and reach, play with our expectations and the conventions of the gallery space, and use a range of equipment to allow the viewer to fully engage with the work in ways that are playful and immersive. In what was a banner year, here’s a quick recap of the ones we liked most.

Cell by James Alliban and Keiichi Matsuda

In this Kinect-powered piece, Alliban and Matsuda wanted to explore how people represent themselves on social media platforms, namely, how we sometimes fabricate our personas to appear not as we truly are, but how we want to be perceived. The piece tracks a person's body as they wander into the installation space, assigning them a fictional identity that is brought to life through a web of tags describing personality traits—mined from actual online profiles—that float across a digital "mirror". The display creates a cloud of data that is representative of the viewer’s virtual reflection, constructing aspects of their fictional identity for them and growing over time.

Jeff Koons Must Die!!! by Hunter Jonakin

If you’ve every felt frustration towards the art world and its many contradictions (and really, who hasn’t?), then this video game installation might help you blow off some of that steam by letting you blow shit up. Ever wanted to take a rocket launcher to the works of Jeff Koons? But, much like the art world, it’s a game no one can win—if you choose to not unleash hell, you’re rewarded with some time to check out the works, but eventually time will run out and it’s game over anyway. If you do start blowing stuff up, then a pack of gallery assistants and lawyers come after you with murder in their eyes, eventually overpowering even your mighty bazooka.

PRISMA 1666 by Wonwei and Super Nature

Using a custom-built iPad app, visitors control projected visuals that play across the prismatic surfaces of 15 triangular crystal blocks arranged on a white tabletop. The beams get reflected and and refracted, forming beautiful patterns and visuals. The piece is both an homage and an exploration of Isaac Newton’s experiments in the fields of optics and fundamental physics, which helped shape our modern, scientific understanding of the world. As users move the touchscreen to change the the piece, it becomes an ambient audiovisual meditation on color, form, and angles.

Gabriel Barcia-Colombo’s Holographic Video Sculptures

Gabriel Barcia-Colombo takes the idea of collecting into strange new territory by creating a series of video sculptures of miniature people inside ordinary objects like suitcases and blenders—taking inspiration from societal archetypes like housewives and businessmen, as well as from his own Facebook friends. The pieces then react to viewers through a series of embedded proximity sensors or other triggers like buttons, dials, or by punching a timecard clock, like in

A Point Just Passed

above. Trained as a filmmaker, Barcia-Colombo reaches beyond the limitations of the screen by placing the figures outside of their typical two-dimensional framework and transforming them into beautifully haunting, holographic reflections of ourselves.

Origin by United Visual Artists and Scanner This—UVA’s largest installation to date—was originally brought to life as the Coachella main stage, a sculptural installation-meets-performance platform called The Orchestrion. It then underwent many transformations, shape-shifting its way through our various Creators Project events before ending up at our New York Event in DUMBO as Origin.

In the video above, you can see it pulsing with light, engaging with its environment like a strange, otherworldly spacecraft, complimented by Scanner’s incredible score to create a dialogue between light, sound and space. Not only did it interact with its environment and respond to the visitors who stood inside it, it also stirred its viewers to make their own art, breeding creativity and interactivity in a new way. Read the story of its journey here.