Alexander Wiethoff's Colour Vision, installed at the Museum of Perception, in Rohrbach (Austria), allows the visitor to change the room colour with the position of his body. Each posture symbolizes a different status like activity, calmness, reflectiveness and is visualized by different colours.

The installation made me think of Will Pappenheimer's Public Mood: Light Temperature. When installed at ZeroOne San Jose, the system will allow Internet users to change the light temperature of the cafe space. The artwork is inspired by the mood ring, which displays the emotional condition of its wearer as color hue. In this case it is a public issue which must be chosen by the Internet participant and then translated into color temperature for the cafe space. The accompanying website will present a simple question about a current public issue. Once web users have submitted their answer to the question, a search engine will retrieve key words from a Google NEWS search associated with the public issue "mood." The user then chooses a cultural color model, which aligns the chosen color with the public issue "mood." This color is then translated to a server in the cafen space, which translates the designated color to a DMX controlled system of LED lights projected on the ceiling. When online users are not engaged in mood selections, the system will automatically search the web for public issue "moods" to change the colorcast.

The installations transform the directives of surveillance, home automation and open-sourced Internet applications into possibilities for network participation in architectural mood.

But let's get back to Colour Vision, the installation raised my curiosity and as i couldn't find much information about it on the website, i asked Alexander Wiethoff, a German interaction designer currently based in Italy to give me more details about it:

[Click-through for interview...]