Fátima revisited: an interactive installation

Three very young shepherds, on May 13, 1917, reported seeing “... a lady even brighter than the sun...”, floating a meter or so in the air, near an old oak tree, when they were pasturing their little herd in Cova da Iria, Portugal. The story of OurLady of Fátima has remained one of the most remarkable odes in Portuguese folklore. It is, beyond the religious event in itself, a key episode in the official history and culture of the Portu-guese people. It is a day celebrated every year; more among thefaithful believers, but also in the media and even as a political catchphrase, widespread, recognized and cele-brated, including by the Vatican and several Popes. In this paper, we present two mul-timedia installations where the central figure is Our Ladyof Fátima, following two main ideas: (a) a “door” opens up the possibility to access multiple space-time experiments, and (b) we try to reach into the Portuguese imaginary surrounding the appearance of Our Lady of Fátima, using a female archetype suggesting a “sacred apparition”. Both installations use a Microsoft Kinect sensor to detect the presence of a viewer for trigger-ing the start of the narrative, followed by recognizing different movements of the view-er(s), e.g., moving left, right, forward, backward, etc., to create different flows in the presented narrative –even at some point changing the face of Our Lady of Fátima with the face of the viewer. Both installations use similar hardware and software concepts, except that the first one uses a Rear Projection solution where the narrative is presented by the image of Our Lady in real size and the second uses a Hologram.