Social Engineering Exhibition
Social Engineering reflects on manipulation, perception and recipients' interaction and ownership in media and social environments.
Dates: June 15-17, 2012
Location: Berlin Mitte, Auguststraße 89, Private Exhibition Space
Collaboration: Christine Gottschalk, Chan Sook Soi, Daniel Herrmann
Overview:
Temporal Intersections explores the relationship between time, presence, and interaction.
This installation challenges conventional perceptions of time and space by transforming them into participatory dimensions—shaped and altered by the movements and behaviors of visitors.
Installation Details:
Software: Reason 5, Quartz Composer, Automator
Equipment: 3 Microphones, 1 Web Camera, 1 MacBook Pro, 1 Audio Interface
Spatial Design: 5m x 2m canvas installation, delineated with black tape on yellow floor
Concept:
At the heart of Temporal Intersections lies a responsive sonic environment.
A surveillance-style webcam segments the exhibit space into dynamic zones, calibrated to detect changes in luminosity. When a visitor moves through these trigger spaces, their presence modulates light levels—and at a set threshold, this activates specific audio samples: drums, textures, or ambient recordings.
This system transforms human movement into a compositional force. Visitors unknowingly choreograph the soundscape, becoming both subjects and co-creators. Their steps and gestures resonate as sonic events, mapped not to buttons or interfaces, but to shadows, shifts in brightness, and invisible boundaries.
Through this interaction, the installation questions authorship, agency, and the porous line between observation and participation. The camera’s eye is not only a tool of surveillance, but a divining rod—detecting the energetic ripples of presence in time.
- Surveillance and Consent: The use of a webcam and reactive thresholds plays with the ethics of presence—visitors shape the work simply by being seen.
- Time as Experience: Rather than a fixed axis, time unfolds here as an emergent rhythm—responsive, fragmented, and co-constructed in real time.
- Embodied Feedback: The body itself becomes a signal, and space becomes an instrument.
Sound Samples:
Live interactions were recorded during the exhibition, producing a unique library of sound fragments. These samples are traces—temporal artifacts of momentary human presence.
Streamable excerpts from SOCIAL ENGINEERING are available and reflect the spontaneous interplay between structure and serendipity, gesture and echo. They offer an auditory immersion into the ephemeral memory of the space.
Temporal Intersections is a ritual-machine—a field of perception in which memory, light, and motion intersect to create an unrepeatable, living archive.
Social Engineering Exhibition 2012 15.16.13
Social Engineering Exhibition 2012 16.14.47