The concept of chat has a very tight relation to its tools and software. The existence of new technologies gives people the opportunity to exchange their emotions, thoughts and ideas with one and other. Chat rooms are one of the telematic medias that millions of people use to talk to each other IRUS CHAT was made to form dialogues between Iranian and American artists. The hope is that this software becomes a tool to start a dialogue. A dialogue which the world is thirsty for.
This project started as IRUS Chat, a program envisioned by Majid Kashani as a way for the teams in the United States and Iran to connect through chatting and the sharing of photographs and video.
Retaining the spirit of IRUS Chat while changing the technology from chat to presentation, A Story of IRUS is an interactive application that attempts to engage visitors to the exhibition in a dialogue about the history and nature of the collaboration. I chose to expand the concept of CHAT to encompass a visual dialogue between the works and an interactive dialogue with the audience by using questions as well as the artists themselves to trigger key elements of the application.
I started with these questions as entry points into the project to help decide not only which aspects of the documentation were important for us to show, but also to give a wider cultural context to the work. Why did we choose these literary figures? How do the teams differ in how they make and approach art?
My goal is for the viewer to be able to start piecing these questions together. I focused computer vision technology on the specific problem of representing the act of paging through a book. I am interested in the technology only so far as it can provide an interface that is both simple and surprising.