The artwork:
Insult me ! Yes, insult me, please !
No, this is not about humiliating someone or something, this is about freeing yourself from any negative vibrations.
L'Exutoire is a kind of punching bag that won't make you sweat. If you are feeling angry, if you'd wish you could kill your boss or a colleague today, come and drop the worst insults you can think of inside the reverse megaphone.
L'Exutoire, is the French word for "outlet", as in "it is the solution when you are seeking outlets for your frustration".
Using the French word is a reference to the fact that we, French, are very good at it :)
Also, the megaphone is a tool that is very popular in France, especially during strikes and protests, which are a kind of oldschool "exutoire", even though I believe protests are often inefficient as outlets, as people don't really feel much better after :)
Here, I wanted to build an efficient "machine", thus reversing the megaphone and using it as a microphone made sense. Instead of shouting in the streets, where those who you target won't listen to you or instead of insulting people directly, I propose that you insult a machine... the machine takes it as a game, it transform insults in a video game. The stronger your insults are, the more points you get. Once you get to know how many points you did, the generative part of the artwork starts to grow plants and flowers on the screen... the more points, the more growth. The idea here is to oppose a zen scenery to your anger, a basic of anger management, I believe.
Technical details
While the screen is a high luminosity version of a popular 42" screen "Totem", the reverse megaphone required a lot of work.
The copper part is made of an actual megaphone in aluminium, which has been sandblasted, then plated with nickel and finally plated with copper and polished.
The base of the reverse megaphone is made of pure aluminium, machined following a model I made in 3D. Once finished, the piece has been anodized in deep black, so that it could look like plastic or meteorite stone... as it doesn't reflect light like most common objects.
The microphone inside the reverse megaphone is a Zoom H1.
On the software side, we used Microsoft Speech Recognition API, some javascript (nodeJS) and all the generative artwork has been written from scratch in WebGL.
Below is a sample video of the generative artwork :