The work of artist Juliette Sejourné focuses on the concepts of "attention" and "little inner voice".
Crédits photos : Juliette Sejourné
Artist Juliette Sejourné has created an interactive installation that initiates a dialogue between a human being and an object, in this case a coffee cup. Equipped with sensory sensors, it delivers an interior monologue to the participant, sending him back to his own thoughts. The artwork, which questions our relationship with technology, is part of the selection for the next edition of the Recto VRso festival on April 11-14, 2024.
A talking coffee cup?
“Tsukumo Cafe” is based on one question: what do you think about when you drink coffee? Juliette Sejourné gets a coffee cup to talk, as part of its inner monologue. To do this, the participant wears headphones that send out binaural sound. The concept is simple: they sit down, pour themselves a cup of coffee and start drinking it. As they move and hesitate, the coffee cup begins to ‘speak’. Sensors placed on the cup enable the little voice to be adapted according to the participant’s movements. As the monologue progresses, the participant is disturbed or amused, creating a poetic and symbiotic experience.
This interactive installation is inspired by the ancient tradition of the tsukumogami. According to the Japanese, an abandoned object is occupied by a spirit after a hundred years. The artist changed the original purpose of the coffee cup – to drink coffee. She turns it into an “connected anti-object”, capable of expressing its thoughts. Here, the notion of inner dialogue serves as a driving force for interaction. What the little voice in the cup tells us echoes our own inner monologue, creating gestural reactions that can be perceived and analysed by the sensors.
Memories of a connected anti-object
With this project, artist Juliette Sejourné questions our relationship with technology. Connected objects, as we know them in our ultra-modern society, often take us out of the real world. The idea behind “Tsukumo Café” is that the cup becomes a being in its own right, and not just an animated interactive object. “In this installation and device, I therefore question the principle of interaction with objects too exclusively tied to question-and-answer exchanges (as is classically the case with connected objects such as Alexa or other commercial avatars),” explains the artist.
By taking part in “Tsukumo Café”, the spect-actor is invited to enter into contact with the cup, which reacts according to the spectator’s actions. In this inner dialogue, two temporalities are superimposed. “First the memories of the coffee cup, with its own virtual sound environment of a coffee shop, talks and songs, activated in real-time by your action, in the real environment.”. The participant lives their real life, while being in real time with the virtual life of the coffee cup.
Juliette Séjourner’s artwork, in collaboration with Anthonin Gourichon and Frédéric Bevilacqua, can be seen at the Recto VRso digital art festival on April 11-14, 2024.
