Discontrol Party

  • Interaction Design
Interactive Party Dispositif by Samuel Bianchini, 2009-2011
La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), 24 & 25 June 2011
Project developed as part of the research project Large Group Interaction
at EnsadLab/DRii, École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs
with the support of the Cap Digital business cluster and of the Ile-de-France region within the framework of the program Futur en Seine 2011
In partnership with the Gaîté Lyrique
in collaboration with the Calhiste laboratory of the University of Valenciennes, the European Institute of the Sciences of Humanity and Society (MESHS-CNRS) – Lille and the Espace Pasolini – International Theatre of Valenciennes
as part of the research project Praticables (ANR-08-CREA-063) supported by the National Research Agency
Music programming : Sylvie Astié (Dokidoki)
Friday June 24th : Schlachthofbronx ; Ceephax Acid Crew ; Absolute Body Control ; Errorsmith ; DJ Krikor
Saturday June 25th : Captain Ahab ; Covox ; Bass Jog (DJ Elephant Power + FX.Randomiz) ; Nero’s Day at Disneyland ; DJ Krikor
Environmental visualization software (KetchupAddict): Oussama Mubarak in collaboration with Tomek Jarolim and a contribution by Marie-Julie Bourgeois
Embedded RFID-UWB capture : Xavier Boissarie et Jonathan Tanant (Orbe) with technology and partnership of the company Ubisense
Video device (artistic collaboration and engineering) : Antoine Villeret and Keyvane Alinaghi
Technical consultancy : Cyrille Henry
In partnership with Philips
On “Second Life”, teleperformance Disorder Screen Control : Lucile Haute, Claire Sistach, Alain Barthélémy and Frédérick Thomson with the support of EnsadLab/EN-ER and for the hosting on Second Life Metalab 3D-ARTESI île-de-France
Design of RFID accessories: Claire Bonardot, Ornella Coffi, Cécile Gay, Jennifer Hugot, Pauline Jamilloux, Laure Pétré, Valentine Rosi, Chloé Severyns, Alice Topart, students in Textile & Texture Design and Fashion Design at EnsAD
Thanks to the Progis company and to the Francophone Library

Discontrol Party is a dispositif which brings together two worlds: that of state-of-the-art surveillance techniques and that of partying. The dancefloor/live music venue/performance space will appear in the dual spotlight of a partying event and a data-driven control and surveillance system (computer vision, RFID, recording by smartphones, etc.) The main space of the Gaîté Lyrique becomes for the space of one evening a night-club set up as a control room: far from light effects or other VJing, the participants, while partying, are confronted by multiple visualizations of the IT system which observes them and seeks to analyze their behavior.

Like a game presented to a focus group or a large scale Beta-testing, the challenge is launched: Can partying outplay the system? Lead it into a confusion which escapes it? Cause breakdown? Create a bug in the system? Because here, you are invited to a party where the “monitoring” by the dispositif on which you are acting is openly visible: the mappings and the listings of movements and behaviors, the attempts at interpretation, the raw images from the surveillance cameras, those same images transformed for and through automatic analysis, the representation of the activities of the IT systems and, further, the consequences of these activities in the virtual space of Second Life and the reciprocal infiltration of this universe into the party.

Surveillance and partying: if these worlds seem entirely opposed on all fronts, they both however are based on group – or even crowd – activities. But the former, most frequently destined for public spaces, focuses primarily on ordered crowd movements: a flow of persons, a line or waiting room, a boarding platform, etc. The rapid, disordered and even sometimes fusional movements of partying are at the limits of compatibility with the detection, tracking and aim to individually identify of the increasingly automatized dispositifs of surveillance and control: recognition of shapes, individuals, behaviors, traceability… In provoking their confrontation and possible overrunning of one world by the other, this prospective dispositif could reconnect with primitive traits of some of our oldest rituals: partying, celebrating, group celebration.

The musicians invited to incarnate the dispositif Discontrol Party are the evolutionary front-line of current electronic music: they are all experimenters, provocateurs. We can trust them to unleash a celebratory energy – with the verve and taste for danger of stunt riders – in the Discontrol dispositif : and to incite the spectators to do likewise !