Client: HIP Developments

Overview

‘Hello, Hello’ is a poetic messaging system inside a luminescent arch inviting passersby to greet each other through music and light in Cambridge, Canada.

A five-storey arch and reflective façade overlooking the Grand River’s banks, Hello, Hello turns people’s voices into a lyrical spectacle, marking the entrance of 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 arch in shafts of colour, transforming into music and light. Voices intermingle to create singular harmonic moments, while the wave-sculpted façade reflects the constantly evolving scene before it.

Hello, Hello is an interactive installation that fosters collective expression and collaboration between participants. This intervention is designed to bring strangers together in a spirit of play and cooperation, no matter their age, ability or the language they speak.

Hello, Hello is one of two Daily tous les jours pieces commissioned for the Gaslight District, as part of the developers’ vision of creating “Joy Experiments”—public realm interventions fostering community through play.

Goals

Hello, Hello is an interactive installation that fosters collective expression and collaboration between participants. This intervention is designed to bring strangers together in a spirit of play, cooperation, and creativity, no matter their age, their ability or the language they speak.

The location of the artwork faces the Grand River, aligned with a pedestrian bridge connecting to another part of town. The sculpted mirror surface transforms an imposing 20 x 45 m solid wall into a welcoming transition space from the river banks to the new site, and introduces a 10m bright, interactive archway that can be seen from across the river. Three microphones catering to different heights are located at the base of the arch.

When someone offers a greeting or message, their voices are modulated through a vocoder into lyrical electronic phrases, the words then transposed into echoing notes from a piano. Meanwhile, shafts of light travel up the archway carrying the message. In reconstructing the message, Hello, Hello accounts for the speaker’s tone, cadence, and duration, rendering every message as unique. When multiple voices communicate together, patterns of light and sound mix into one chorus.

Process

The Gaslight District is a mixed-use development built on the site of a 19th century foundry, 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.

Developed through research, interviews and engagement workshops with the local community and stakeholders, the artwork is an exemplar of how investment in the public realm is essential to reimagine and activate places and encourage collective interactions.

Our methodology is based on designing for multiple levels of engagement: for the advance users who will find all the easter eggs and trigger secret modes, for the longplayer who will play for hours, for the ones who will just make a few steps and still trigger a few notes while passing by, and people just watching. We know that by engaging in physical play, the body releases stress and anxiety. So does just watching; seeing others acting silly and having fun also turns out to release our happiness hormones.

Additional Information

In our Babelesque world so often confined to the size of a screen, we wanted to create 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.