Skip-Rope Habitat

Image credit: RL Owens.

A cavalcade of 8-bit colour is projected in the installation space, each newly generated hue triggered by a turn of the skip-rope. The limited colour palette reflects the limited language skip-rope rhymes use to communicate the stories and sundry "trappings of a particular period", as folklorists Iona and Peter Opie would say; both schemes trying to express something of our world.

This documentation is from the Habitat's most recent presentation at the Montréal Science Centre, during the 2011 Technofolies festival, organized by Groupe Molior. The habitat was open all-day, every-day for festival-goers to play with. I was glad to have the chance to talk with visitors about some of the technologies employed in this artwork; the ubiquity of switches in electronics as well as so-called 'random' number generation in computer science.

Installation demo. Video credit: Allison Moore.