SEE ME THROUGH YOU

Ikse Maître, 2015

Immersive and interactive digital artwork

Materials, techniques, and processes: Aluminium framework, standex and screen fabrics, 8 infrared sensors, 18 loud-speakers, 4 computers, and 11 videoprojectors

Dimensions: External aluminium framework (11×11×3.9) m3 – Central aluminium cylinder of 2 m diameter and 3.15 m height

Themes: See me through you ("Vois moi à travers toi") aims at making visible the deformation of space-time and tangible the visitors’ relativity with one another.

When visitors step in See me through you, they make one thousand two hundred billion steps in the universe. They become a galaxy, which is associated to them and follows each of them through the deep universe around them. A black hole, forty times the solar mass, is simulated in the centre of See me through you. It locally deforms space-time over the neighbouring height billion miles.

Light does not propagate over there along straight lines anymore but according to curved geodesics of space-time. The visitors directly experience the gravitational lens effects, projected onto the central cylinder around the black hole. The black hole curiously make us see what it hides from us.

While observing the strange images, which these effects generate with respect to the extraordinary alignments of heavenly bodies, the visitors observe the light that comes from the other side, from other visitors, who they cannot see. When two visitors are aligned on either side of the black hole, they gather and disperse here and there the image of the galaxy of one another in a ring, the Einstein’s ring.

The presence of someone else modifies the environment in which we evolve. Through these modifications, our behaviours differ. Without seeing it, without really knowing it, we instinctively perceive someone is watching us. While seeing the other one, while knowing it, we deliberately behave differently and all the more curiously in the other one’s eyes. In See me through you, not seeing the other ones makes it possible to see them in a different way, to watch them elsewhere, to observe them through us.

[Concept] Matthieu Courgeon and Ikse Maître

[Soundscape] Michel Bertier

[Simulation and relativistic 4D GPU rendering] Matthieu Courgeon

[Motion capture] Michèle Gouiffès

[Scientific board] Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaud, Hervé Dole, André Füzfa, and Roland Lehoucq

Photo: Claire Lise