加拿大Hello, Hello & River Line聲光拱門問候裝置

Hello, Hello and River Lines are two Daily tous les jours pieces commissioned for the Gaslight District, a new district revitalizing the edge of downtown Cambridge, Ontario, as part of an initiative aiming to foster community through play and the site’s history. A radiant five-storey archway and reflective façade overlooking the banks of the Grand River, Hello, Hello serves as the front yard and welcome mat for a new district revitalizing the edge of Cambridge’s downtown.

Passersby are invited to deliver a greeting or message at one of the three mic stations arrayed at the arch’s base—to their friends, a stranger, the city, or the river. (“Hello River, how are you?”) Voices travel up the archway in shafts of color, transforming into a playful message of music and light. While voices intermingle to create a singular harmonic moment, the wave-sculpted façade that serves as Hello, Hello’s backdrop reflects the constantly evolving scene before it.

River Lines: Installed at one end of the Gaslight’s inner courtyard—a multi-purpose event space that is also the city’s largest public plaza—River Lines tells a story in which the city’s past and present overlap, using the river and flood line as our thread. Anchoring this publicly accessible courtyard, this wave-patterned interactive pavement embedded with 62 light rings and sensors becomes a joyful exercise in musical collaboration. Set only a short distance away from the Grand River, River Lines shifts the city’s attention back to its long-neglected waterfront, its design and musical score highlighting how for more than a century the river has been central to the rhythms of community life.

Daily tous les jours leads an emergent field of practice that combines interactive art, storytelling, performance, and urban design to reinvent living together in the 21st century. Hello, Hello contributes to this mission by offering a new way to greet each other in public space, while River Lines invites strangers to connect and collaborate to create music. Their multi-sensory and interactive format stimulates creativity and collaboration, transforming words into a crowd-sourced concerto, animating an urban-scale landmark, and further inviting to play and transform the city.
Hello, Hello & River Lines ignite social interaction while creating a suspended collective moment to take in the natural and urban landscape.

We believe these little connections between people outside their echo chambers can go a long way. Building on the words of American political philosopher Michael Sandel: “Democracy does not require perfect equality. But what it does require is that people from different backgrounds encounter one another, bump up against one another, in the course of our everyday lives.” Hello, Hello and River Lines creates a strange moment for strangers to come together, one musical message at a time.

In our Babelesque world so often confined to the size of a screen, we wanted to create a new ritual that reminds people of the importance of physical connections. These interactive installations are ones where we achieve more together than alone, designed to bring strangers together in a spirit of play, cooperation, and creativity, no matter their age, their ability or the language they speak. Hello, Hello is a ritual that emphasizes the music and harmonics of how we communicate, both with humans and the environment around us. Inspired by a kids’ game of broken telephone, where the inputs and outputs don’t always exactly match, Hello, Hello is all about presence, the non-verbal, and what’s missing from our online communications. By using the human voice to create musical bridges between people, it’s an invitation to connect beyond words.

River Lines, with its different instrument sections assigned to positions across the pavement’s surface, invites players to connect the dots to create arpeggiated clusters of notes that harmonize along with the playing of others to create one rich tapestry of music. A large screen overlooking River Lines plots the players’ movements on a colourful animated map for everyone watching.
Music emanates from the ground as if by magic. Twelve in-house tailored audio tiles were developed to have no visible hardware and blend into the pavement pattern. The entire piece is made to resist outdoor conditions and is suitable for permanent installation.

Hello, Hello and River Lines are two Daily tous les jours pieces commissioned for the Gaslight District in Cambridge, Ontario, as part of the developer’s vision of creating “Joy Experiments”—public realm interventions designed to foster community through play.

The Gaslight District is a mixed-use development built on the site of a 19th-century foundry that was the engine for much of the region’s early industrialization. For the team at HIP Developments, all proud Cambridge locals, the district is something of a legacy project, an ambitious effort to revitalize their historic downtown and make it a place of connection and culture for the larger community, embracing more progressive ideas about urban development.

Our methodology is based on designing for multiple levels of sustainability:
– the choice of materials was made with care for durability, as both artworks were made to last in time
– Hello, Hello’s arch support was made of unpainted aluminum for ease of future use
– aiming for the smallest carbon footprint possible by using local providers

We are also offsetting the carbon footprints of our artworks by buying carbon credits to Planetair (a non-profit organization recommended by Équiterre and the David Suzuki Foundation).

《Hello, Hello》和《River Lines》是專為安大略省劍橋市煤氣燈區委託製作的每日每日作品，這個新區位於市中心邊緣，旨在通過結合遊戲與地區歷史促進社區復興。

《Hello, Hello》是一座五層高的光芒四射拱門，立面反光且氣勢非凡，俯瞰著格蘭德河的河岸，如同新區的前院與迎賓地毯。路人在拱門底部的三個麥克風站，可向朋友、陌生人、城市甚至河流傳遞問候或訊息，像是「Hello River，你好嗎？」。聲音透過拱門內的彩色通道傳播，轉化為有趣的音樂和燈光訊息，隨著音聲交織，創造出奇妙的和諧瞬間。而拱門的波浪雕刻立面，則映射出周圍不斷變化的景象。

《River Lines》則位於煤氣燈區內庭院的一端，這裡是多功能活動場域，也是劍橋最大的公共廣場。作品以河流和洪水線為靈感，串聯城市過去與現在，嵌有62個光環和感測器的人行道波浪圖案，不僅是互動裝置，更是一種音樂合作的喜悅實踐。作品將城市的注意力重新引回久被忽視的河濱，距離格蘭德河僅數步之遙，其設計與音樂呈現出河流數百年來作為社區生活中心的歷史與當下。

Daily tous les jours 將互動藝術、故事敘述、表演與城市設計結合，開創新興的實踐形式，重塑21世紀公共生活。通過提供一種在公共空間相互打招呼的新方式，《Hello, Hello》實現了促進互動的使命，而《River Lines》則邀請陌生人共同創作音樂，將城市空間變為一個創意與聯結的場域。這些多感官、強調互動的設計不僅啟發創造力，還鼓勵協作，為公共地標注入新活力，並邀請人們參與和改造城市生活。

這些互動作品激發了人們之間的社交連結，同時為自然與城市景觀創造了短暫但深刻的集體欣賞時刻。在這個被螢幕侷限的巴別塔世界中，我們希望通過新的儀式喚醒人們對身體連結的重視。這些裝置彰顯了透過遊戲、合作與創造力，如何將不同年齡、能力或語言背景的人聚集在一起。以孩子們玩的破電話遊戲為靈感，《Hello, Hello》探索了存在、非語言溝通以及我們在線互動中缺失的元素，透過人聲搭建超越語言的音樂橋樑，邀請人們建立更深層次的連結。

在《River Lines》中，人行道表面的不同位置代表不同的樂器部分，演奏者透過行走連接各個點，創造出琶音音符，並與他人的演奏協調，編織出豐富的音樂掛毯。大型螢幕則用彩色動畫地圖呈現玩家的互動，讓所有人都能參與與觀賞。音樂從地下飄出，宛如魔法般奇妙，透過內嵌於路面圖案的12個定制音頻模組實現，硬件完全隱藏，並專為戶外永久安裝設計。

《Hello, Hello》和《River Lines》是HIP Developments為實現「歡樂實驗」計劃願景的重要作品，這個計劃旨在通過遊戲創新社區的公共空間。煤氣燈區建於一座19世紀鑄造廠舊址上，該地曾是早期工業化的核心地帶。對於開發團隊而言，這是凝聚當地驕傲的遺產項目，通過振興歷史悠久的市中心，將其打造成充滿活力的社區中心，展示現代與歷史交織的魅力。