Shaping the future of interactive art

How Canada’s Iregular is forging memorable connections between people and the public space

Using your hands to create and then interact with virtual birds, fish and locusts.

Opening your mouth and seeing your avatar vomit garbage. Closing your mouth and seeing computer-generated plants grow through that garbage and reclaim the space.

Striking poses and watching as digital icebergs emerge from your body and float away.

Using your smartphone flashlight to browse through photographs of the environment or photographs of celebrities.

These may sound like scenes from science fiction or video games, but they’re also what happens during Creatures, Products, Icebergs and Telescopes, the 4 interactive experiences that comprise Our Common Home (pictured above), a new public art exhibition that will be seen outside North America for the first time when it’s unveiled at Expo 2020 Dubai on February 10.

“Our Common Home is a 4-chapter interactive journey that uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to track the movement and behaviour of people engaging with large media facades,” says Éloi Beauchamp, CEO of Iregular, the Montréal, Quebec-based new-media art studio that created the artwork, which debuted in Montréal in October 2021 and has been shown in Chicago.

“The idea is to use interactive visual art to raise awareness of our impact on the environment,” Beauchamp explains. “In Products, for example, you’re having fun engaging with this interactive piece, but then you see a representation of yourself vomiting mountains of garbage, which makes you think about the waste we produce.”

Here, Beauchamp shares more about Iregular, including how it established a foothold in the United Arab Emirates, how its cutting-edge technology has helped it survive the COVID-19 pandemic and what comes next.

On how Iregular started
I met Daniel Iregui, Iregular’s founder and creative director, in 2018 and thought his art was fantastic. My intent was to bring him onto the roster of L’Éloi, the production house I run, but instead we became partners in 2020. Since then, we’ve taken what had been a small studio and turned it into a growing company.

On operating during the pandemic
Two weeks after Daniel and I became partners, the pandemic hit. For a new-media art studio that focuses on public art, this was not great news. Thankfully, we had just received a Canada Media Fund grant. So we decided to spend time making the company as strong as we could for September 2021, which is when we thought the world would reopen. For the next year and half, we worked on our catalogue and our technology and kept meeting people. We were on Zoom for 18 months, talking to thousands of people all over the world: artists, cultural event planners, politicians, trade commissioners, art galleries, museums.

On Iregular’s focus on public, interactive art
Daniel has always pushed the boundaries of interactive art. For example: how could it work at long distance? And be touchless? And allow for multiple users? He’d been thinking about all this before the pandemic, so when we understood the implications of COVID-19, we said, ‘Holy moly, creating this sort of technology makes so much sense now!’”

On Cursor, the technology Iregular developed during the pandemic
It’s a long-range, touchless tracking system that uses optics, computer vision and artificial intelligence to turn any façade into a multi-user interactive display. With just a computer, a camera and the Cursor software, we can track light from a smartphone, body movement, hand movement and faces. The technology is used in Our Common Home and 2 other installations, Antibodies and Points in Common. The whole system can be operated remotely. During the pandemic, we had shows in South Korea and Australia, and all we had to do was ship the gear. Someone else would install it, and we’d remotely calibrate it, which allowed us to be active without travelling.

On the Canadian-ness of Our Common Home
Climate change and environmental degradation aren’t just Canadian problems—they’re global problems. I think Canada is at the forefront of the global climate discussion and has taken the initiative to solve the problem, and in a way Our Common Home highlights that. But the work is also an example of how Canada, and Montréal in particular, is a global hub for interactive art and artificial intelligence. The world knows Canada is a leader in these fields.