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.
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 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.
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 also commissioned for the city of Cambridge.
