Intro
Made in collaboration with the L’Okapi Foundation for their I See You Event in 2025, I Close My Eyes in the Dark is an interactive installation that allows participants to create colorful, abstract digital art with their feeling. The project was rooted in mental wellbeing, creative expression and the relation between them. Based on the research question of:
“How could an interactive, audiovisual experience where the user participates, aid in the strengthening of mental wellbeing?”
Concept
Consisting of a screen, headphones and a camera, the installation is built to see the user and translate the way the user approaches the installation into a visual response. The entire experience is centered around a single gesture: the opening and closing of one’s eyes. By keeping one’s eyes closed and listening through the headphones a variety of abstract sounds from everyday life is heard. When a sound is heard that resonates with the user, they can open their eyes and watch as a colorful, generative drawing unfolds across the screen, translating that moment of deliberate feeling, recognition and choice into the start of their own digital drawing.
Process
The design was shaped by extensive research into creative expression and mental wellbeing. An important insight was that self-expression can function as an active coping style, allowing people to process emotions by externalizing them. Despite that a lot of people within the target group of this project noted having difficulty expressing themselves creatively. Mentioning that they often become too concerned with whether or not the outcome is aesthetically pleasing, or pretty or not. That’s exactly why for this project, the control over the end result was reduced and more emphasis was put on the deliberate choice, based on feelings, memories and a personal resonance.
Development
The project combined real time audiovisuals with interactivity as well as facial recognition using the Mediapipe library. Everything was built and assembled in Touchdesigner, where the webcam video input was used in combination with Mediapipe to detect human faces and specifically focus on the eyes. Based on that information, a system could be made that would start playing sounds from a selection once the user’s eyes were closed for a certain amount of time. Once a user would open their eyes again, a visual system that used particles as well as noise to create the swirling, flowing, line-like patterns I was looking for. Various parameters were taken into account such as the tilt of the user’s head and how long it takes them to respond to a sound.
Outcome
At L’Okapi’s I See You event, attendees could use the installation to create their own abstract artworks based on those personal moments of emotional expression. These individual works were collected anonymously and used as input for a concert visual during the live performance at the end of the evening. Doing so, private expressions of feelings became a shared audiovisual experience, allowing participants to contribute to the performance without having to expose themselves.
In 2026, a selection of user-created artworks from the installation was shown during the month-long “Emerging Artists Unveiled” exhibition, giving these captured moments of interaction a second life as a visual archive.
