Doors 2015

THÉORIZ Studio

Doors. (© 2015 THÉORIZ Studio, David-Alexandre Chanel, and Romain Constant)

In indoor physical spaces, the door is the main obstacle to entering and exiting rooms and hallways. From a usability perspective, Donald Norman is celebrated for wondering how “such a simple thing as a door” can be “so confusing” [7]. The door as physical object has been transformed metaphorically into a transportation device that allows us to completely shift our perspective from one location to the next. The object itself is often imagined as a “portal” between spaces and worlds, as it was in 1950 in the quintessential fantasy novel, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis. The children in the story open an apparently ordinary wardrobe door and are transported to the magical world of Narnia. Many other movies and stories use doors as portals through time and space, such as the phone booth door in the movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Doors. (© 2015 THÉORIZ Studio, David-Alexandre Chanel, and Romain Constant)

Doors by THÉORIZ Studio, a group of artists and designers based in Villeurbanne, France, is a portal that takes on the middle ground between virtual and physical space. Built around the structure of an actual door, sensors surrounding the door track visitors’ movements and change the portal on the screen’s perspective in a real-time anamorphic system that adjusts to their visual angle in real time. The project uses four-channel, immersive spatialized sound so that onlookers can be immersed in virtual landscapes by simply moving their bodies around the space. Doors fits the theme of “data materialities” as it uses the framework of a physical door and manifests itself only through physical interaction with visitors, whose angle of view becomes the pivotal interaction point of data manipulation.