Interactive digital narrative
I developed a QR-based visual-novel-style system that visitors could access through their phones. The experience introduced them to DIVIDUAL’s fictional world through choices, dialogue and interactive storytelling.
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Project 02
Collaborative interactive installation
Tinderbox Collective × Ray Interactive
Hidden Door, Edinburgh
2026
DIVIDUAL
An interactive installation disguised as the public showroom of a fictional technology corporation.
Visitor analysis in progress
Developed over two months through Tinderbox Collective’s Room to Play programme, DIVIDUAL invited visitors into a playful but increasingly unsettling world of surveillance, persuasion and automated attention. Cameras, sensors, games, responsive objects, sound and live performers transformed the room into a system that appeared to observe, understand and recruit everyone who entered.
01 · The premise
A friendly system with something darker underneath
DIVIDUAL presented itself as an innovative technology company offering personalised experiences, emotional support and new forms of connection.
Visitors could scan, play, move, dream, listen and interact with a collection of strange products and services. Beneath the friendly branding, however, the installation suggested something more troubling: a corporation constantly watching, interpreting and responding to its users.
The work used humour, surprise and apparent technological intelligence to explore how easily convenience and personalisation can become forms of surveillance and control.
02 · The audience journey
Inside the showroom
01
Sign in
Visitors entered through a QR-based sign-in system and were introduced to DIVIDUAL’s fictional corporate world. Scanning the code opened an interactive visual-novel-style experience developed for mobile devices, allowing each visitor to move through a branching narrative through their own screen.
02
Be observed
Networked cameras and tracking systems responded to activity throughout the room. A bag might shift the soundscape, while the system could recognise—or appear to recognise—an object and address its owner directly. The result was humorous, personalised and slightly intrusive.
03
Test the products
Visitors encountered the Dreamcatcher, dioramas, responsive screens, moving elements, motion-controlled objects and fictional corporate wellness technologies. Individually they appeared helpful or entertaining; together they exposed the more controlling logic of the company.
04
Enter the illusion
Magic became part of the installation’s language. A card prediction framed through dreams and apparent mind-reading extended the idea that DIVIDUAL could know something about visitors before they revealed it themselves.
03 · Contribution
My role within DIVIDUAL
I joined Room to Play as one of the participating artists and worked across interaction design, sound, performance and collective development.
Networked camera systems
I worked extensively with networked cameras and TouchDesigner, creating responsive interactions based on visitors and the objects they brought into the space. Visual information could influence the installation’s sound and behaviour, producing apparently personalised responses.
Sound and atmosphere
I created and contributed to several soundscapes using Logic Pro X and other live systems. Rather than functioning as background music, sound responded to the showroom’s shifting states and moved the atmosphere between playful, seductive and unsettling.
Magic and audience interaction
I developed and performed an interactive card prediction in which the idea of a visitor’s dream became part of the magical reveal. This connected live magic to the wider fiction of a system capable of analysing, predicting and understanding its users.
Collective development
Many parts of DIVIDUAL were built collectively. I contributed to testing, refining, installing and connecting the different experiences into a shared environment shaped by repeated workshops, technical experiments and public testing.
04 · The QR narrative
A story entered through the visitor’s phone
The DIVIDUAL mobile experience used the familiar action of scanning a QR code as the entrance to a fictional corporate system.
Instead of functioning only as information or registration, the phone became part of the artwork. Visitors entered a visual-novel-style narrative in which choices, interfaces and corporate language shaped their relationship with DIVIDUAL.
Each participant encountered part of the company privately through their own device while remaining inside a collective public environment.
Source link to be added
DIVIDUAL OSConnected
Visitor profile · 001
Welcome.
We already know you.
Your choices help us build a more personal experience.
Continue willingly
Ask what is collected
Begin analysis →
Scan → enter → choose → return
05 · The responsive camera system
When the room notices you
Networked cameras fed visual information into TouchDesigner-based systems operating throughout the installation.
Carrying a bag might change the soundscape; presenting another object could trigger a spoken or displayed reaction. The installation appeared to recognise the visitor while leaving the boundaries between automation, performance and illusion uncertain.
Visitors were never entirely sure how much the system genuinely understood, how much had been designed in advance and how much depended on human intervention.
06 · Magic inside the system
Prediction, dreams and manufactured certainty
Within the installation, I performed as DIVIDUAL’s magician.
The interaction centred on a card prediction connected to the visitor’s dreams. Magic offered another form of apparent technological intelligence: information seemed to be known before it had been disclosed, while coincidence was framed as evidence of the system’s power.
The small-table encounter contrasted with the larger screens and automated technologies around it, replacing the distant authority of the corporation with a direct exchange between performer and participant.
How much does the system already know about you?
Performance documentation forthcoming
07 · Related performance
From installation to stage
Alongside the installation, I performed with Masala 3, joined by Abhiroop on guitar and Aishwaria.
The performance combined piano, beatboxing, guitar, voice, audiovisual processing and gesture-controlled electronics. Using MediaPipe and Ableton Live, I controlled aspects of the guitar’s delay and reverb through physical movement while also performing piano and beatbox.
The result extended DIVIDUAL’s concerns into live music: bodies, instruments and digital systems continuously affected one another, with control distributed across performers and technology.
Related performance
Masala 3 at Hidden Door
Audiovisual performance for piano, beatbox, guitar, voice and gesture-controlled electronics.
Performance page forthcoming
08 · Collective process
Built through exchange
DIVIDUAL was developed over two months through weekend workshops, additional weekday sessions, technical experimentation and collective installation work. Its identity emerged through negotiations between different artistic and technical contributions rather than from one central author.
- 01
Explore
TouchDesigner, sensors, cameras and interactive systems
- 02
Prototype
Individual experiments, games, sounds and objects
- 03
Connect
A shared corporate fiction and visual language
- 04
Test
Technical integration and audience journeys
- 05
Present
Hidden Door 2026
09 · Reflection
Learning to share control
DIVIDUAL changed how I thought about collaboration and participatory technology. Much of my previous work had begun with music; here, I entered a process in which the world of the project was constructed collectively across visual art, installation, physical computing, performance and fiction.
Learning TouchDesigner and working with networked cameras expanded my technical practice, but the most important change was conceptual. Technology became less of an instrument to demonstrate and more of a social situation that people could question, interrupt and play with.
The project showed me how live performance, magic and installation could belong within the same artistic world. Each offered a different way of shaping attention and belief.
What remained with me most was the value of making technology accessible without making it predictable. Visitors did not need to understand the code or equipment. They only needed to enter, become curious and begin to test the limits of the system.
Technology became less of an instrument to demonstrate and more of a social situation.
10 · Credits
Participating artist credits pending final verification
Project information
- Project
- DIVIDUAL
- Context
- Interactive installation developed through Room to Play
- Presented by
- Tinderbox Collective and Ray Interactive
- Presented at
- Hidden Door 2026, Edinburgh
- Development period
- Two months, 2026
- Created by
- The Room to Play artists
- Siddharth Biswas
- Interactive systems · Networked camera development · TouchDesigner · Digital narrative development · Soundscape creation · Live performance · Magic and audience interaction · Collective installation development
- Photography
- Chris Scott
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