LOVE DOODLES

In March 2010 the Aarhus Art Museum, ARoS, opened the exhibition ”I Love You”. In relation to the upcoming opening Kollision presented an installation concept for doing interactive doodles. As the exhibition takes a broad perspective on the concept of ‘love’, the Love Doodles project was a suitable platform for communicating fun, serious and kinky statements in one, integrated frame. Kollision developed the installation as a sponsorship to ARoS.

Many Danish museums are currently struggling to rethink themselves as well as developing new ways of communicating and presenting content. Social media and web 2.0 has convinced many public institutions that visitors want to be engaged and comment on exhibitions and installations. But is this really the case? As a reaction to this approach Kollision developed a simple concept in which the visitor becomes part of an interactive installation by writing or drawing with a white board marker on a piece of glass, and take a picture of the drawing – and the user – by pressing a button. The picture then becomes part of a large, playful mosaic of statements and users.

Love Doodles are constructed as a cubic box. The front consists of a piece of glass, a 7” display and a button. Behind the glass a camera captures the user and the doodles. When the visitor is satisfied with the composition, pressing the button captures an image, stores it in a database and displays it in the dynamic mosaic. This setup can be useful in many other settings to gather simple, playful comments from users. The concept was later developed into our Mosaic Software, which has been used in numerous other projects.