“The…” is an interactive installation that considers the theories of David Bohm, that it is not the mind that generates thoughts, but a thought is a universal entity that enters our brains and influences our actions. Taking social media such a Twitter as an expression of a “global” thought and making it visible, we want to see whether that is indeed true, or if we can take some control and change the course of “our thinking”. The interactive installation “The…” enables viewers to interact with ‘thoughts’ by casting their shadows on the wall of a gallery. Thanks to motion- and body shape sensing cameras such as Kinect, the shadows of the viewers casted on the walls, will be able to engage into an interactive play with “thoughts” loaded from a live twitter feed. Although seemingly accidental and random, the displayed messages are the result of algorithms that construct searches from a pool of words and then reach out to twitter, finding users who express thoughts in connection to the search words and phrases. As the thought returns to the application, animated from the head of the viewer we see the words that connect the heads and as these are returned back to the cloud, two new words are selected and the search process begins again.

“The…” was conceptualised and created by Kasia Molga and Brendan Oliver, produced by V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media and shown in ISMAR@SHIFT Festival in Basel, Switzerland, October 2011.