28 Feb 2024
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.
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.
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 colours 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 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.
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.
“By using the human voice to create musical bridges between people, it’s an invitation to connect beyond words.”
Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat, co-founders of Daily Tous les Jours
In our times of unprecedented population growth and division in urban areas, the artwork forges new modes of interaction for public spaces.
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.
The Gaslight District is a mixed-use development built on the site of a 19th-century foundry when the region was known as “the Manchester of Canada.” Today the region's industry leans more high-tech, with manufacturing in technologies like robotics and satellites, while also being home to the University of Waterloo, one of Canada’s leading institutions for advanced scientific research.
Another press kit on a similar project was also commissioned for the city of Cambridge.
A Musical Pavement for Pedestrian Choreographies
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.
Daily Tous les jours’ previous projects include Musical Swings (2011-2014-2021), a series of swing sets which unlock sequenced melodies; Cimbalom Circle (2022) for Budapest’s House of Music, part of Daily Tous les jours’ series of musical pavements; Bouchées Sonores (2022), a curation of sound experiences to accompany those eating in public settings; and Daydreamer (2022), rocking benches that play soothing music through collective motion.
