_Be Your Own Souvenir_ aims to connect street users, arts and science, linking them to underlying spaces and their own realities. The installation was enjoyed during two weekends in January 2011 by the tourists, the neighbors of _La Rambla_ and citizens of Barcelona, a city that faces a trade-off between identity and gentrification, economic sustainability and economic growth.

This takes shape through a technological ritual where the audience is released from established roles in a perspective exchange: spectator / performer, artist / tourist, observer / object. The user becomes the producer as well as the consumer through a system that invites them to perform as a human statue, with a personal souvenir as a reward: a small figure of them, printed three-dimensionally from a volumetric reconstruction of the person generated by the use of three structured-light scanners (Kinect).

The project mimics the informal artistic context of this popular street, human sculptures and craftsmen, bringing diverse realities and enabling greater empathy between the agents that cohabit in the public space.


Links: http://www.blablablab.org/

blablabLAB was born out of the development of a prototype framed by the “Lightscapes” workshop (James Clar, Scott Fitzgerald), held in Hangar, Barcelona, at the end of 2008. Over the past two years the group has expanded with contributions from other friends and fields—such as electronic engineering, environmental ecology, fashion design, avant-garde cuisine, visual arts, anthropology and biochemistry—to be engaged in various projects often related to an event.