Entrance Ritual Offers a New Way to Say Hello

Daily tous les jours experiments once more with new ways to ignite social interaction. Hello, Hello, a poetic messaging system inside a luminescent arch turns peoples’ voices into a lyrical spectacle.

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Photo credit: doublespace photography

With its five-storey reflective façade overlooking the banks of the Grand River, the artwork serves as the front yard and welcome mat for a new district revitalizing the edge of Cambridge, Ontario, inviting people to engage creatively with their surroundings and each other.

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Photo credit: Wilson Costa

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Photo credit: doublespace photography

Interaction

Passers-by are invited to deliver a greeting or message at one of three microphones at the base of the installation. Their voices slowly become music and shafts of colors that travel up and over the 13m luminescent arch. In transforming messages, Hello, Hello accounts for a speaker’s tone, cadence, and duration, rendering every melody as unique. When voices from multiple microphones meet, they interact with one another to create a singular harmonic moment. The wave-sculpted mirror façade amplifies the resonance of the constantly evolving scene before it.

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Photo credit: doublespace photography

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Photo credit: doublespace photography

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Photo credit: doublespace photography

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Hello, Hello, close-up of a microphone
Photo credit: doublespace photography

Harmonics of Communication

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. In our times of unprecedented population growth and division in urban areas, the artwork forges new modes of interaction for public spaces.

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Photo credit: doublespace photography

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Photo credit: doublespace photography

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Render Hello, Hello
Photo credit: Daily tous les jours

About the Gaslight District

Hello, Hello is one of two Daily tous les jours pieces commissioned for the Gaslight District in Cambridge, Ontario, by HIP Developments, as part of their vision for “Joy Experiments”—interventions designed to foster community through play.

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Photo credit: doublespace photography

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Photo credit: doublespace photography

About Daily tous les jours

Daily tous les jours leads an emergent field of practice that combines interactive art, storytelling, performance, and urban design to reinvent living together in the 21st century. Founded in 2010 by Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat, the award-winning Tiohtia:ke / Mooniyang / Montréal-based studio has been producing projects in over 60 cities around the world. Working in partnership with municipalities, public realm programmers, and private sector clients, Daily tous les jours' interventions are designed to create unexpected experiences that bring strangers together in a spirit of play, cooperation, and creativity.