PENINA’S DRESS

Penina’s Dress is an interactive installation prototype developed for the Holocaust Gallery in The Breman Museum of Atlanta. This installation tells the story of a holocaust survivor, Penina Bowman, who fell in love to an American soldier while being imprisoned in a Jewish concentration camp. She not only successfully escaped the camp, but she also carried the dress, the token of love from her lover, with her in her escape.

As a collaboration with The Breman Museum, this installation is designed under the museum’s spatial, ethical, and scalability constraints, and it is also themed under the 4Rs that the museum values: Resistance, Resilience, Rescue, and Resourcefulness. Inspired by this theme, the idea of “effortful interaction“ is proposed — consuming this story should be intentionally participatory and effortful — the interactor is required to mindfully and effortfully press into a fabric interface to interact with and expand the story.

Design

The installation is composed of two components: a fabric interactive projection surface and a Pepper’s ghost display.

The projection surface is made of stretchy fabric for the interactors to touch and press. This surface is both the controller and a secondary display for the installation. Both the position of the touch and depth of the press are captured by a Microsoft Kinect as input for this installation.

Pepper’s ghost is an optical illusion technique that projects images on transparent surfaces, creating an overlap of the projected illusion on top of the real background that resembles a holographic display.

Personal Contribution

This work is a collaboration of Anuraj Bhatnagar, Travis Gasque, Zehua Chen, and myself. I personally proposed the idea of effortful interaction, and made the Pepper’s Ghost display.