Venus Villosa. Interactive intallation. http://www.silviarigon.com/works/venusvillosa. The way we perceive and make use of our body is not only the effect of natural causes, but also and most importantly the product of cultural constructions of our identity in relation to the complex way we comprehend reality. As new technologies allow the exploration of a different level of interactivity and involvement of the body in the sphere of the artistic experience, a subsequent need to rethink some of the metaphors associated to the different senses has emerged.

Venus Villosa seeks to question the way in which digital media art is developing its own formulas for staging installations. It is a response to the forecast announced by the proliferation of the interactive use of motion tracking devices, where, along the predictable lines of the western tradition, the notion of the body is reduced to an abstract entity, a silhouette scanned by optical and infrared sensors or by video tracking devices. Venus Villosa’s journey into the erratically unlawful act of touch takes the shape of a tactile interface, nested into the referential landscape of the myth of the Beast and the underlying relationship to the ideas of primitiveness, sexuality and taboos that is represent.

The aim of the project is to design a system that enhances the physicality of the interactive experience and at the same time it critically addresses the notion of the body as the polarizing subject against which the culture of technology shapes its dreams of disembodiment. It is a comment on the unresolved ambivalence of our relation-ship towards nature as it concerns our body and our identity in particular in relation to gender characterization. It is inspired by the historical iconography of the medieval myth of the Wild Men and Women and by the fairytale “the Beauty and the Beast”. The installation is articulated around three metaphors: the hair, the breast, and the sense of touch as a way to unfold the dichotomies of the beauty and the beast, the ideal and the material, the natural and the artificial.

The installation consists of a low lit room, a table in the middle with a tray of squeezable glowing breasts, and a floor to ceiling projection of the lower torso of a woman, gently spinning in the dark. The background sound of a rainy forest is sprinkled with the unsettling gurgling of unidentified creatures. Visitors walk up to the table and find a sign that reads: “squeeze gently.” By means of a pneumatic mechanism connected to a com-puter, a series of behaviors are associated to the squeezing of each breast. In fact, each breast triggers two behaviors: one is a distinc-tive sound (either a odd animal sound or a human voice sampled from beast related movies); the other is the growth of beast-like hair on the torso of the hitherto beautiful woman. By engaging in the usually forbidden activity of art (and breast) touching, the user turns the beauty into the beast. In contrast, by releasing his or her contact the beast goes back to beauty.

In this installation, the interactivity is in the service of the content. In other words, I was interested in exploring a form of interactive participation that not only triggers the various media (such as sound and images) but also works as a meta-commentary, reinforcing the significance of the user’s experience as a whole. The combination of tactile experience, images and sound is fully integrated as a unity by the interactive mechanism. Interactivity should not be reduced to the novelty of the interface; it should be regarded an emotional and metaphorical process, an integral component of the art piece.

Venus Villosa received an Excellence Award at 7th Japan Media Art Festival in 2004, has been exhibited in Los Angels, Tokyo, and in Tallinn during ISEA2004.