Assemblance is a environment where the audience can create a light structure
which they can manipulate.
They can interact with.
As if they are physical.
And they can dissipate with other audiences to create this environment.
And hopefully they can coexist.
We didn't really start from a single idea.
It came out of a process.
You know, all of our work is built iteratively and it kind of comes from itches that we want
to scratch.
And one of them was wanting to kind of question the distinction between physical and virtual.
Which is getting quite a blurry distinction these days.
And the other one was, wanting to explore how people would work together to create things.
And what happens when they have to kind of trust each other to be delicate with the things
that they've created.
In the past we play a lot with laser.
Especial media.
And we we were fascinated by the fact that we can create a structure in space
out of nothing.
You can come in here with me.
You almost see more of the reflection than you do.
And it's almost like prison bars.
More than the wall, you see the reflection.
But this one right, yeah.
Just specifically.
If you facing, yeah.
If you're facing the right direction of course.
Yeah it's usually when stuff doesn't work, that you really start to learn something about
the limitations of a particular piece of hardware or a particular technology.
You know sometimes we've even discovered colors, just because the cable failed.
So when you are building these structures out of light they're quite fragile.
You know, if you're too aggressive with them, if you move too quickly you can shatter.
Both the illusion and the actual kind of physical wall that you might have created with your
gestures.
But if you do something with somebody else, theres certain sort of things you might do,
for example holding hands with somebody else, you'll create a shape or a structure that's
more resilient.
You'll actually be almost able to walk through it without destroying.
So what's playing out here is, you and what we've seen people do is, you know, they start
off sometimes just working on their own.
Making cones around themselves or sort of tents.
Then they start to build walls.
Sort of gesture in space and they create sort of shapes.
And then they suddenly realize that these different shapes of they're creating interact
with each other.
They kind of bump into each other.
So when somebody else walks past your wall, they can brush it in such the ripple.
They might walk right through it and then they shattered.
And so over time people starting to build up much more sophisticated shapes.
The things that take place in the environment, that only one person in the entire three months
might experience.
We have these sort of easter eggs throughout the project.
Where under exactly the right conditions which might be the time of day and a particular
movement, certain things will occur.
Maybe nobody else has seen.
I hope that there's a kind of sense of of suspending disbelief.
And a sense of kind of wonderment.
Again wanting to question that distinction between physical and virtual, what's been
kind of really interesting to us, is to see how people start to treat these light structures
as if they were materially and physically in front of them.
You know, almost stepping over them instead of walking around them.
Which is a kind of vindication of this idea, that the perceptual mechanisms we have, you
know, whether the thing out there is physical or virtual.
Kind of it becomes irrelevant.
I think I want them to care about other people's stuff.
Just a step further than okay, believing that this is real.
And by that, I mean like okay, they believe that other people's stuff is real as well.
And if they break other peoples stuff, that means something to other people.
And next step is probably a collaboration.
Two people would want to create a room inside space together like kind of thing.