Daniel Vera-Villalobos

During the past year, our interactions outside our household have been digitally mediated and we have understood our home, through the digital, as the place from which we access the digital social space. The same way that we augment our social identities with our online presence, our spaces become also augmented by it - where home was understood earlier as the first social entity, now it is the first public entity. Home is our virtual background to our digital frontend.

The augmented interactive documentary ‘Encuentros’ explores the weight of identity as it develops and projects itself onto a space that is shared. It attempts to represent the contemporary relationship of inhabitant and habitat in its multilayered presence and make the audience reflect on the benefits and dangers of digital hyper-mediation within residential spaces.

‘Encuentros’ - a word in Spanish used to define both a meaningful encounter and the point of intersection of two masses in architecture - invites the audience to observe the concept of home through a case study. It gives the user tools to navigate the non-linear narrative as if it were a space itself, to explore the different layers of the inhabitants' identities in parallel to the strata of the spaces. In the documentary, this particular home becomes public through its digital viewing.

To visit the interactive documentary: 

https://encuentrosdocumentaries.com/

/// Project selected as Demo for the Media Architecture Biennale MAB 20 ///

‘Encuentros’ explores the potential of interactive web tools to achieve non-linearity. Instead of the traditional non-linear approach where a main storyline branches out on certain points in time, it experiments with the idea of using flexible navigation to express human-centered architectural concepts in a more accessible and relatable experience. 

In this networked gathering, the audience can navigate the spaces to explore the contents of the documentary while interacting with other users within the space. The scenes of each character are presented in the room they belong to, and after two loops, all the rooms de-activate except the kitchen, where the three characters join to discuss together the meaning of home. This timeline is repeated infinitely.

Visually, the most important feature is the use of photogrammetry as point-clouds to represent the built environment and the characters. The pointcloud assets were made by Rarea Studio, with the assistance of Álvaro Vera to generate the initial photo sets.

The audio in the environment is positional. It’s composed of recordings taken from the videos and ambiences recorded in each of the rooms. The user can mute/unmute within the experience, to control their social interaction with other members of the audience.

/// Project selected as demo for the Media Architecture Biennale MAB20 ///

[...] To explore these questions, I would like to start considering the home as a being, whose identity is a reflection of that of its inhabitant and is, just as they are, affected by the apparatuses of neoliberalism. [...]

/// CHS Dissertation awarded with Distinction ///