Captured

Project
The project of Hanna Haaslahti Captured is a participatory installation, which captures your face and creates a new identity for you in a collective scenario taking place in virtual world.

Captured enables people to step into virtual world as a digital double, making them actors and spectators in the same time. The doubles take different roles in a narrative simulation modeling unpredictable moods of human crowd behavior.

Which role will you take on? The bully, the target or the bystander? And what does it say about your primal instincts in watching aggressive social behaviour?

Music
The music expresses interactively the actions of the captured Avatars. The piano is the central ingredient of the orchestration, used in its conventional way, but also by recording of sympathetic resonances.

Each avatar carries around her own piano resonance, while in the peaceful walking state. Each resonance is follows its avatar while collectively composes a wall of sound made out an interwoven network of small. When violence starts, each action is depicted by the frantic gestures of a small music ensemble: piano clusters, drum rolls, cymbal hits, bass drum kicks. Music gestures and avatars gestures are directly interconnected as one gesture.

Silbersalz – International Science & Media Festival, 15.-19. September 2021, Halle, Germany
Expanded/BFI London Film Festival, 6.-17. October 2021, London, UK
CPH:DOX festical 23. March – 3. April 2022, Copenhagen

Credits:
Lead Artist: Hanna Haaslahti
Lead Developers: Mike Robbins, Alap Parikh, Tyler Henry
Capture Station Design and Construction: Panu Heikkilä

Interactive Music Composition: Phivos-Angelos Kollias
“Hello World” music track by Jamie Perera / reorchestrated by Kollias

Producer: Marko Tandefelt
Co-Producer: Harmke Heezen
Produced by Fantomatico and High Road Stories

Place VR

Project
Place is a VR experience that revives the Great Synagogue of Aleppo through digital walls and memories.

Since the end of 2022, Place is exhibited in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

The prototypes of the project have been shown at the film festivals DOK Leipzig and Docaviv .

Sound
As the project is trying to recreate the experience of the Synagogue, like a archeological reconstruction with the senses, also the sound follows the same path.

Thus the approach within the VR experience and the videos, was mainly to recreate the feeling of being back then and there.

I used several archived sounds mixed with contemporary recordings to travel the listener back to the environment of Alepo.

Created in collaboration with High Road Stories productions:
Mike Robbins & Harmke Heezen

Proper Motion VR

Project
A music Virtual Reality installation, inspired by the images and sounds of the ever-changing night sky.

Music
In this VR project, I created an interactive music ‘score’ using electro-acoustic music tools and coding in MaxMSP. The main idea comes from different forms of mapping, from the ‘mapping’ explanations we attempt to perform in order to explain Nature, to understand and appreciate music, or a movement that becomes sound.

In Proper Motion, sound and vision interconnect as a unified whole. Our actions are equally apparent visually and sonically. A human gesture becomes a musical gesture. But what are we interacting with? What are we hearing?

Following the premise that everything becomes something else at some time, and mirroring the same approach with that of the visuals, we have started with musical found objects which are reformed, remapped, recomposed into something completely new, while incorporating seeds of their origins.

We reverse-engineer original scientific processes used in mapping electromagnetic spectra to audible sound frequencies: the sun’s fluctuating radiation, the pulse of the earth passing through a meteor shower, a chorus of atmospheric disturbances released at daybreak.

The motion capture of a dancer, recorded somewhere else in space and time, is likewise a mapping, in this case, of physical movement into a set of points floating in a digital space.

A decades-old, archaic electronic music composition used electricity run through wires and circuits to map musical thought onto plastic discs we call records.

In  itself data is devoid of meaning and emotion, beyond the simple fact it exists, and it reveals patterns. But what happens when they start to be mapped to one another: the billion year-old light of a star talks to a sixty year old piece of electronic music that causes a women’s hand gesture, originally made years ago, to move in a completely different way?

Premiere at the BFI London Film Festival
October 7-19 2020

Created in collaboration with High Road Stories productions:
Mike Robbins & Harmke Heezen