Gestures of Change (2013) is an interactive networked installation at the Di-Egy 2013 Festival in Cairo, Egypt, that employs apophenia as a creative tool to invite viewer-user’s into the experience that so many Egyptians felt during the civil and political unrest during the spring and early summer months of 2013 in Cairo.
The installation invites viewers to interact with an interface and with other users in the gallery space, using only their faces and their position in the room. The interface tracks the position of the viewers face, imposing Twitter feeds one word at a time, from different accounts maintaining similar names to the 2013 Egyptian president.
The collection of the word for word Twitter feeds from all accounts represented onscreen at a given moment are used to create mash-up sentences that are then reTweeted to the @GesturesOChange
account.
Sounds of the chaos in the 2013 streets of Cairo can be heard and abstract digital swarms of people seem to be attracted to
the coin/face of each Dictator on screen in order to create malice and disrupt their efforts.
When viewer-users are close to the screen they become dictator #1 and the viewer-user furthest from the screen is the last of the dictators numerically. When viewer-users are close to one another a white line with the arabic word "inshallah," meaning if God wills it, it will come true" appears between them.
