Swarming Lounge 2.0 is a mixed-reality performance and installation where visitors come to meet four live performers and nine augmented-reality characters displayed on smartphones. All characters, both real and virtual, are embedded in the architectural environment of the venue, where the visitors themselves stand.
Suspended from metal poles, set in the space of the installation, are twenty-four large digital images, displaying enigmatic scenes of interplay between these numerous protagonists. Consisting of fragments of performative instructions written in miniature font, these panels hold a dual role as visual artworks and triggers for the augmented reality scenes.
Wandering through this meta-dimensional gallery, the visitors find themselves prompted to experience different qualities of attention, eventually leading to an altered awareness of perceptual modes of intertwined degrees of reality.
Between the visual tableaux, conceived as an extension of the architecture of the site, the viewer encounters the flesh-and-blood performers, behaving as if they were part of these digital images, at the same time as the virtual characters, who merge with their live counterparts through the lens of the telephone. Here in this overlapping of architecture and bodies, the difference between the real and the virtual blurs.