Skip to main content

Interactive bar shelves 2008 – PROPOSAL

A playfull bar that plays a trick on you

Bottles are exposed behind the bartender. They line up on two long shelves and become partially hidden by sandblasted sliding doors. The translucent quality of those doors allow us to perceive the shape of the bottles in the back. But little by little one would notice slight changes in the overall shape of the shadows of the bottles, and soon you will realise that those shadows are twisting and expressing their own playful life.

It’s probably time to quit drinking, right? By the time you point out to your neighbour the strange phenomenon, the shadows will most likely have returned to their expected positioning in front of each bottle. But you, you are hopefully still trying to find a good explanation.

 

 Artistic Experiment Project

The story is hidden in the shadows

The project adds a ludic dimension to the center of gravity of nightlife: The bar. I-Bar-shelves adds a discreet but powerfull twist to the experience of sitting in front of an exquisite bar desk, getting lost in inner thoughts and meditating about the precarious conditions of our existence. The I-Bar-shelves is an ‘ambiant media’ because simulated shadows of hidden bottles get their own life only after a while. They start to twist into blobs in a discreet and non invasive manner.

What makes the project interesting is the exact correlation between simulated shadows and real bottles behind the sandblasted sliding doors. If the number or positionning of bottles is changes the shadows get adjusted as it is in “real life”. Some “unlucky” bottles may project “conventional shadows” – shadows without magical morphings or non-radiant bottles. The shadow becomes the key for the consumer to choose the very right bottle for a special evening. It becomes an added value for a specific brand which is represented in the I-Bar-shelves as ‘active avatars’. Contextual agreements can be made with a specific brand to ‘shape’ or ‘program’ the simulated shadows in specific ways.

Credit
Design and concept: Hanne-Louise Johannesen and Michel Guglielmi (Diffus Design)