EPFL Lausanne
ArtLab

With the help of a spherical interface that emulates the curvature of the dome itself, every viewer can navigate through this huge archive. The ability of a dome to completely envelop the viewer's visual field in a mediated environment has continued to provide a revolutionary framework for pioneers in art and science. The concept of an “experiential” dome environment was first developed by the art and engineering collective “Experiments in Art and Technology” for the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. Such early developments in dome projection theaters arose from attempts to simulate the “spherical shape of the human visual field” and were aimed at exploiting and expanding sensory perception.

Reclined under the fulldome in a hemispheric gestalt, participants in Jazz Luminaries create an experience of their own that unfolds the social network of more than 5,400 musicians whose recordings make up a portion of the Montreux Jazz Archive containing over 18,000 performers. The installation transforms this UNESCO Memory of the World collection, digitized at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), into an interactive experience of aesthetic transcription. Through a unique multimodal interface Jazz Luminaries allows viewers to cut, remix and replay over 13,000 videos of songs by those five thousand jazz greats from a total archive of 11,000 hours of video.