The Word

The Word is an interactive experimental installation where the core experience is the simulation of a ritual gesture based on written language. This ritual gesture is generally a representation of how couples symbolize their love emotion and romantic relationship by writing down their names on a physical object.

The project is comprised of three parts: a web application, a database and a holographic projection. The web application is the first section in user experience. It provides a website where audiences could enter their names, their lover’s names or a very short brief sentence which could stand for their emotion status. This section tries to mimic how the lovers write down their name on a physical thing. Instead of a tree, a wall, a stone or a lockpad, audiences leave those emotional words on Internet.

And then, all the messages that people enter will be sent into the database. This step copies the process how people leave their romantic words in our physical real world and complete in the virtual world. Their texts would be saved in the digital world forever. The function of database is not just keeping the data. It also sends all the information to another terminal, which is my holographic projection.

In the third section, the holographic projection part, all the text data could be transformed into 3D geometry. And after reflecting and projecting those 3D texts according to the optics laws, the holographic projection will create 3D illusions of the text data in the real world. In this final step, the text shows up in front of the audience’s face without any tangible carriers and completes the ritual gesture, which is embodied with it.