‘Pan’ is an interactive visual installation that facilitates a collaborative performance among multiple participants. The title of this work, ‘Pan’, is a Korean word invoking various different meanings: plate, disk, place, and stage. The ‘plate’ and ‘disk’ can be straightforwardly translated as its lexical definition. As the concepts of ‘place’ and ‘stage’, Korean people gathered in an open space to share communal activities from the Agricultural Age. For example, they prayed their enough crops at the beginning of the farming and also celebrated a bumper crop together at the harvest. Many of delightful and traditional performances originated from these activities and then ‘Pan’ is the abstraction of the spatial significance of this culture.

The inspiration from the word, ‘Pan’, transforms this historical tradition into a new digital media art. Three different sized circular tabletops and interfaces represent ‘plate’ and ‘disk’. Also, ‘Pan’ is not for individual but for groups of people within the space of the installation. It conveys the concept of a common area to gather participants to play such as ‘place’. Finally, people turn and tilt the tabletops to create frames of visual and auditory rendering, which is a performance in a ‘stage’. The visual imagery of ‘Pan’ installation is symbolized from one dynamic form of a famous Korean traditional performance, ‘Sang-mo-Nol-ie’. While playing ‘Sang-mo-Nol-ie’, performers wear hats with ribbons on top and move their heads actively. The ribbons fly in space making free shaped beautiful lines. The visual element of ‘Pan’ simulates this performance into newly encapsulated images.

‘Pan’ accommodates a collaborative performance by giving a tangible interactive medium. The audience approach ‘Pan’, which encourages joining in its synthetic movement feeling its live force. Live activities in tradition are interpreted as softened dynamics in a new media installation, ‘Pan’.

AD 597 - Master's Project, Prof. Doug Ischar

Pan Thesis Documentation [ movie clip, 320 x 240 px, 8.25 MB ]

Pan written Documentation [ PDF 0.86 MB ]