Antenna

PHI: Can you explain to us the principles of Daily Tous les jours and what led you to favour the collective aspect in your experiences?

Melissa Mongiat: We come from an environment that combines technology, design and narration. By working with interactive technology, very quickly we were led to work in the public space, because that's where people are. This allowed for more interaction and storytelling. It is the best and the worst audience: at the beginning, people do not want to participate, but when a change takes place in them, it is the most rewarding feeling of all because it is born out of a certain difficulty. We create magical contexts to encourage human-to-human and human-to-environment connections.

Mouna Andraos: The studio’s passion is to create opportunities for conversation between people and potentially between people who would not necessarily exchange. Each project is an invitation to meet and interact with each other. Then why the collective? We are guided by the joy of seeing people coming together. The opportunity for humans to share these experiences makes them more connected and empathetic to one another.

MM: We often quote the American philosopher Michael Sandel, who says that the essential thing for a democracy is not equality, but to ensure that people of all walks of life can meet in everyday life. That's kind of what motivates us.

P: Since 2010 and the creation of Daily tous les jours, have you noticed an evolution in the level of interactions that people can have, particularly because of technological advances?

MM: Of course, in the beginning it was something new for people, to be able to set off chain reactions with a simple movement. Today we're more used to it. There's so much to do in the public space.

MA: We continue to think about invitations that are clear to the public, so that they can engage in the work in some way. In this sense, inspiration is always sought outside the world of technology, to create a world familiar to all, where technology and screens are part of the universe and are as invisible as possible.

P: Can we say in this case that the environment itself becomes history?

MM: Yes. I'm thinking in particular of Hello Trees, which is a device for communicating with trees. In this case the tree is a protagonist, which responds very slowly (Laughter). And in the case of swings, the air becomes a protagonist.

P: The futurist Ted Schilowitz, who intervenes in the video below, puts forward the idea that technology and storytelling can advance together towards a constructive human experience on one condition: that technology acts as a support, and not as a main element. What do you think? Do you always put history before technology?

MA: It's difficult to argue otherwise. The ability to tell stories is what distinguishes us from other species, as Harari (in his book Sapiens) writes. In practice, for us, it's a dialogue: we're creators first and foremost, and then there's this incredible modelling clay that we play with and that mobilizes another part of the brain.

MM: In terms of technology, we're a little agnostic. It is rare that we use the same technology in all our projects. And each time, technology only illustrates how far we can go in our imagination: we can make everything talk, we can synchronize...

MA: We have a project in which a building tells its story in real time, with information captured on site. There's a lot of prototyping as well, and that's where this dialogue with technology comes in: we develop the stories, then we go out and get the technology we need, and then we adjust our vision.

P: Precisely, about this adaptive and evolutionary side, can it happen that a project goes out of your control, according to the interactions, to become something completely independent?

MM: Yes, it's also part of the process, and that's the most rewarding part of it: seeing people interact in ways that we wouldn't have imagined ourselves.

MA: Narrative is also what people tell themselves when they experience a work. And there too, often they will tell their experience in a completely different way than we had planned. With Musical Swings, from the very first year, we wanted to set up a collaborative exercise and the swing was a simple interface so that people could understand what they had to do and participate with their bodies. Then, of course, people started telling stories about their childhoods. There was a whole romantic side to this reunion with the swing. It has become like a parallel narrative, the reason why this work touches people. And that wasn't our intention at all in the beginning.

MM: The therapeutic side too, with the pendulum movement.

MA: Yes, that's right ...

MM: I'm also thinking of a project in San Francisco, with musical traffic lights. The original idea was to connect the two sides of Market Street, to create an invisible bridge for both sides of the street. People were asked what they saw in this project while it was still being installed, and it's crazy, the vocabulary they used to define the project was the same as ours. Some already saw it as a bridge connecting both sides of the street.

P: Returning to the human aspect, in a time of forced social distancing, how can technology help us to create together human experiences of empathy, art and exchange?

MM: In the beginning, it was a really anxiety-provoking time. Suddenly, gathering together became dangerous. We had to give up the public space. But in the end, technology can help us to better come together, and in some ways become even more human by amplifying our ability to come together, to do things together. So maybe we're going to get to something that will be better than before, with sustainable, pleasant cities, where you can do everything while walking.

MA: Technology will help us find ourselves in physical space and amplify our voices, gestures, messages, our ability to do things together. Technology will be a major player to help us find ourselves elsewhere than through our screens.

MM: At the moment we are very much in demand for projects such as Giant Sing Along, which consists of a musical installation that allows people to sing together. In this case, it's as if technology is bridging the distance between humans.

MA: Two movements are emerging: closing in on oneself or collaborating, and this is at all levels: governments, borders, science, community, etc. But our DNA leads us to believe that what will remain is collaboration.