Summary
Mirror Flower, an interactive light-and-sound sculpture celebrating composer Alexander Zatsepin, will appear at Moscow’s 20th Big Cartoon Festival from November 4–8 after joining the permanent display at the Sputnik aerospace museum in May. A single fisheye camera and a YOLOv11-pose model detect a visitor and the positions of both hands. An authored system then maps gesture speed, force and direction to musical events, with each hand controlling different instrumental layers. The algorithm keeps every choice inside Zatsepin’s harmonic structure, producing variations rather than unrestricted generation. The installation uses themes from the 1981 Soyuzmultfilm animation The Mystery of the Third Planet under license. Its computer-vision processing runs locally and, according to the project, collects no personal data; sound uses Tone.js, visuals use GLSL shaders, and modules communicate through OSC/UDP.
Hana’s perspective
I like the restraint of this design. The neural network does one legible job—pose detection—while authored rules preserve the composer’s harmony. That division is more interesting than claiming the machine composes: visitors gain agency without erasing the original artist or pretending random output is authorship. Local processing and licensed music also show that interactive AI installations can be designed around privacy and rights from the start. For animation exhibitions, this is a useful model for turning heritage material into participation without replacing its creative identity.
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