Overview
in the digital shadow is an interactive installation and artistic research environment about what remains after a project is finished. It turns the residue of creative production - notes, schedules, chats, self-tracking marks, technical leftovers, fatigue, delegation, and recovery - into a spatial memory system that visitors can enter bodily.
At the centre of the installation is a capture chamber. Visitors step inside, become recorded as point-cloud shadows, and see their traces return across projection surfaces and smaller light-sound objects. The installation does not preserve presence as a clean portrait. It delays, layers, displaces, glitches, and recirculates bodies as unstable memory.
The work proposes Embodied Debrief as an artistic method: a way of returning to a completed production through the traces it leaves behind. Instead of treating documentation as a polished record of a final result, the installation asks how residue itself can become structure.
Documentation video
Installation
The installation is organised as a system of interconnected devices. The central cube functions as the Collection Chamber: a site where the visitor’s body is captured, transformed into a point-cloud trace, and projected back into the space. Around it, smaller light and sound objects act as memory slots. They receive fragments, replay them, displace them, and keep the system active even when no visitor is directly interacting with it.
A second interaction layer is formed by the red-line allocation station. Visitors draw a simple red mark on an illuminated surface. This gesture refers to a self-tracking practice developed during the production process, where a red line marked a period of attention directed toward the project. In the installation, the line becomes operational: it triggers allocation events, redirects memory, and changes the behaviour of the space.
As more bodies and gestures enter the system, the installation becomes denser. Projection surfaces fill with traces, sound thickens, red light intensifies, and the system approaches overload. At the threshold, the work glitches, flashes, produces noise, and then releases part of its accumulated memory through a flush-like reset.
Installation views
Photos: Slava Romanov.
System logic
The work is structured around a cycle of operational states developed through the artistic research process:
- Collect - a body, gesture, note, message, decision, or material fragment enters the system and becomes a trace.
- Allocate - limited attention, memory, display surfaces, and system capacity force traces to be assigned, displaced, or postponed.
- Delegate - agency is handed over to people, machines, interfaces, calendars, algorithms, and organisational constraints.
- Overload - accumulated traces and expectations exceed available capacity and become perceptible as density, delay, glitch, sound, and saturation.
- Flush - the system clears enough memory to continue, leaving disappearance, afterimage, and partial reset behind.
These states describe both the technical behaviour of the installation and the pressure of a creative project under conditions of technological abundance. The visitor does not only observe the model. They temporarily become part of it.
Visual studies
Photos: Slava Romanov.
Relationship to umbra
in the digital shadow emerges from the earlier performance project umbra, developed by Slava Romanov and Chi Him Chik. The installation reuses and transforms parts of its material and conceptual infrastructure: the cube, projection surfaces, point-cloud logic, recorded bodily presence, and the question of agency between human performer and computational system.
While umbra was a time-based performance, in the digital shadow is a reflective environment. It returns to the previous production from the inside out and asks how its remains - technical, material, bodily, and administrative - can be reorganised into a new artwork.
Research frame
The project was developed as part of the M.A. thesis in the digital shadow: An Embodied Debrief at the Digital Media M.A., University of the Arts Bremen. The research examines creative production under conditions of distributed agency and overload, where work is spread across collaborators, software, hardware, AI systems, storage infrastructures, budgets, calendars, and bodily limits.
The installation carries this inquiry into space. It lets visitors encounter the dynamics of production residue through their own presence: collection, assignment, delegation, accumulation, overload, release, and afterimage.
Full research text: in the digital shadow: An Embodied Debrief
Technical and material notes
- Format: Interactive installation / artistic research environment
- Medium: Projection, point-cloud capture, real-time media system, light objects, sound, computer vision, red-line interaction
- Core elements: Capture chamber, memory slots, allocation station, perforated text plaques, spatial sound
- Visual language: Darkness, red light, white point-cloud bodies, layered shadows, pixel noise, glitch, overload states
- Origin: Developed from the artistic research project and M.A. thesis in the digital shadow: An Embodied Debrief
Presentation
M.A. thesis installation, Digital Media M.A., University of the Arts Bremen, 2026.
Credits
Concept, system, installation - Slava Romanov
Related performance origin - umbra: In the Digital Shadow, by Slava Romanov and Chi Him Chik
Supervision / research context - Dennis P. Paul, Ralf Baecker, Digital Media M.A., University of the Arts Bremen
Photography - Slava Romanov
Acknowledgements - Chi Him Chik, Jimi Liu, collaborators and supporters of the original production and exhibition context
See Also