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Using technology as a social instrument with Georgie Pinn

LUsing technology as a social instrument with Georgie Pinn

In this podcast you will learn how Georgie Pinn designs interactive media artworks for public spaces. You’ll hear how Georgie builds participation, accessibility, and emotional impact. This interview is part of our series that focuses on media artworks in public spaces.

In this interview, Georgie Pinn explores the creative process behind Echo, an interactive work that has evolved across multiple public-facing iterations, from an intimate one-on-one booth experience to a large-scale outdoor presentation.

Georgie describes Echo as an "empathy engine." It is a guided encounter where a stranger’s story is experienced through a face transformation that gradually becomes your own. We discuss the changes when a deeply personal work is placed into public space. This includes designing for walk-up participation, making interaction intuitive across ages, and shaping narrative for unpredictable audiences.

Listen to this podcast to learn about:

  • Design interactive work for public space that supports multiple entry points and non-linear viewing.
  • Create walk-up engagement so audiences understand what to do within seconds.
  • Prototype with unfamiliar participants to refine UI, affordances, and accessibility across ages.
  • Build for touring, with portability and repeatable installation and operation.

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Chapters

  • (00:00:00) Introduction

  • (00:00:47) Public space origins
  • (00:02:40) Echo empathy booth
  • (00:04:47) Residency spark
  • (00:06:44) Education role
  • (00:07:35) Stories and archive
  • (00:09:53) Consent and ethics
  • (00:11:52) Breaking echo chambers
  • (00:14:16) New iterations ahead
  • (00:16:26) Prototyping process
  • (00:18:50) Collaboration roles
  • (00:20:53) Creative collective
  • (00:22:26) Current projects
  • (00:23:55) Advice for artists
  • (00:26:54) Closing

 

About Georgie Pinn

Georgie Pinn is an interactive creative technologist who makes large-scale multi-sensory experiences using projection mapping and interactive, generative, and sound-responsive animation. She has over two decades of experience across public art, festivals, cultural institutions, AR and VR experiences, music videos, and stage-based work. Her practice is informed by an ongoing interest in how immersive technology and intimate storytelling can elicit empathy and connection. Her artwork has been presented internationally, including venues such as the Barbican in London, Drive in Berlin, the Powerhouse in Sydney, and Lusail in Qatar

Takeaways from this interview with Georgie Pinn

About Echo

“You go into the booth, choose a face on the touchscreen, and watch a real story. As it plays, it slowly becomes you.”

Echo is a one-on-one booth experience that looks like a photo booth from the outside. Inside, the participant chooses a face and watches a real person’s story. As the story unfolds, the face gradually pixelates into the participant’s face. The work is designed to create connection through this identity shift. Over time, Georgie added an option for participants to record their own stories, turning the project into a growing archive.

Using technology as a social instrument, not a spectacle

“I use technology as a social instrument.”

Georgie’s starting point is social. Technology is there to support connection, not to show off effects. This helps her make decisions during development. If an interaction does not increase connection, it does not belong.

Designing empathy through identity exchange

“As you watch the story, it slowly becomes you. By the end you’re looking at yourself, but it’s someone else’s voice.”

Georgie designs empathy as an experience you feel, not a message you are told. The face transformation brings a stranger’s story close. It reduces the distance between the viewer and the storyteller. The shift is simple and direct, which is why it can land emotionally.

Touring was designed in from the start

“I always had it in mind that it would tour. I made it a booth so it could be packed down and transported. It doesn’t rely on a room or fixed infrastructure.”

Georgie built touring into the work from the start. The booth format makes the project portable and repeatable. She also describes having two versions: a higher-end booth and a lighter touring build. That approach lets the work adapt to different sites and budgets without changing the core experience.

A human-led recording process helped people share more openly

“The recordings worked better when I travelled with the work and filmed people one-on-one. Before a story entered the archive, the storyteller signed it off.”

Georgie tried an automated recording option but found the work landed better when she recorded stories herself. The one-on-one process gave people more support and context while they shared. She also built a clear sign-off step before stories entered the archive. That helped protect participants and reinforced that the stories remained authored and approved by the storyteller. 

Public space breaks linear narrative

“You can’t build a linear narrative in a public space like you can in theatre or a venue. People arrive at any time and stay for different lengths.”

One of Georgie’s key lessons is about audience flow. In public space, you can’t assume a beginning-to-end experience. The work needs to make sense in short encounters and still reward longer attention. That means designing multiple entry points and clarity at every stage, not just a single narrative path.

Prototyping is about removing friction for real people

“I design it so a 5-year-old and a 60-year-old can use it.”

Georgie prototypes by testing with people who do not know the work. She watches where they hesitate. Then she adjusts the interface and cues. She gives concrete examples: icons need to be bigger, or sound cues need to guide attention. The aim is instinctive interaction with minimal explanation.

Performers can guide interaction

“I often use performers to show the audience how to use the work.”

In public spaces, people may not know what is allowed. Georgie uses performers as embedded guides. They model interaction from inside the artwork. This helps people join in without turning the piece into a demonstration. It also adds another layer of meaning through performance.

Public space is the hardest frontline

“Working in public space is the hardest frontline. You have to lock everything down, or it gets stolen, graffitied, or smashed.”

Georgie’s main public-space lesson is that risk and durability are part of the creative brief. You can’t rely on controlled conditions. You also can’t assume people will treat the work gently. Security, robustness, and maintenance need to be considered early. They can’t be added at the end. She also suggests that strong work can earn respect if the interaction is clear. The goal is an experience that holds up in the real world and still invites participation.

The audience can change the work and feel changed by it.

Links from the podcast with Georgie Pinn

Edited transcript of this interview with Georgie Pinn

Working in public space to reach diverse audiences

Robin: What originally sparked your interest in working in public places?

Georgie: I started as an artist who worked a lot with installation. I was really interested in site-specific installation, where I’d go into a space and create an experience within it. I’d draw from that space—its meaning and history.

Then I steadily moved into making music videos and doing live VJing. That event space opened up to me, and I worked a lot in performance art. I really enjoyed working with a cross section of an audience, rather than just people who would go into a gallery.

My work is very much about personal transformation, and I want that across the board—not just for people who are artistically inclined or already interested.

Robin: Can you talk a little bit about the differences between site-specific work and public places? It’s almost a nice summary of where I’ve got to: site-specific places can still be in galleries. It’s not necessarily a different location to a gallery. It’s site-specific, and there’s also a different type of engagement.

Georgie: Yeah. Accessibility is really important to me. I want to be connecting and communicating with a really diverse range of audiences.

I’ve done big installations in old prisons and underneath swimming pools. That was the kind of work I was doing when I first started—very interested in the history of a place and the stories held within that space. So my interest in public work is for those reasons.

Echo as an empathy engine: how the one-on-one booth works

Robin: You’ve been working on different versions of Echo for a number of years.

Georgie: Yes.

Robin: What’s the core of that? What’s it like for someone to experience it?

Georgie: Echo is an empathy engine—that’s what I always call it. I use technology as a social instrument.

Echo started as a one-on-one experience in a booth. From the outside, it looks like a kind of graffiti Berlin photo booth. There’s a glitching neon sign above it, and you think you’re going to get your photo taken. But there’s a red curtain—when you pull that curtain back and close it, you’re inside the booth on your own. It’s almost like a confessional booth.

The whole intention of the work is to elicit empathy. It came out of a residency at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), and I was really interested in using technology to connect people—to break down bias and stereotypes and elicit empathy. I wanted to know: could I get strangers to connect in an emotional, intimate way?

So you go into the booth and choose a face on a touch screen. Echo greets you. She’s like an AI character that forms out of pixels, and she says: “I am your Echo. I can help you connect. Come closer.” The machine becomes almost like a translator.

She offers you people who would like to connect. You choose one, and you watch a real story from real people talking about difficult things in their lives—resilience, vulnerability, and how they got through it.

As you’re watching that story, it slowly becomes you. The face transforms, pixelating into your face, so by the end of the story you’re looking at yourself, but it’s somebody else’s voice. They’re blinking with your eyes and speaking with your mouth.

The effect was really interesting. People did feel connected to that person they’d never met, and it elicited very emotional responses—transformative reactions. So yes, it’s an empathy engine.

From residency to touring: designing for portability and repeatable operation

Robin: Tell me more about the residency. How did that spark the work?

Georgie: QUT, at the time, were doing a collaboration with Ars Electronica, based in Austria. It’s the biggest art and tech festival in the world, and it’s in a tiny village called Linz, which increases the population by about ten times when the festival is on.

They have a clever way of connecting tech-based art with business. It’s a great initiative that allows artists to step outside of just being artists and become innovators—having the ability to carve a proper living by working with tech and business.

That residency was available, and I applied. I’d worked a lot with interactive, immersive experiences within education. I’d done work with all age groups—primary school, senior school, and adults—using immersive technology to generate creative agency and allow kids to learn in different ways through co-creation.

For example: they do a drawing, the drawing comes to life as an animated character in real time, and they bring it to life by moving and animating it with their bodies. Then they build stories around it.

In that kind of teaching, I noticed empathy was a great tool for learning. When I applied for the residency, I already had a body of work investigating creative agency and how education could connect with immersive technology. I think that’s why I got the residency.

Robin: A thread I think I’ll have to explore in other interviews is that you—and the person beforehand, Betty—both have a dual practice: public work and education work as well.

Georgie: Yes. I think that’s really important. Artists don’t have just one role. Education is a huge role for an artist because you’re trying to provide a different perspective on things. You’re trying to help people discover—whether that’s conceptual or an embodied experience.

It’s all education, whether it’s emotional education, self-expression, or learning about a story you didn’t know about. It’s an important part of being an artist.

Robin: When someone walks into the booth, are they recording their own stories, or are they just listening and being part of the transformation?

Georgie: When Echo toured around the world as a booth experience—it was at the Barbican Centre in London and at Ars Electronica in Austria and in Berlin in a gallery for three months and in Singapore and South Africa—I did build another layer into the work.

You go in, you experience somebody else’s story, you become them, and then there’s a fourth part where you can leave your own story.

After travelling with it for two to three years, I came back to Australia when COVID hit, and I had a huge archive of stories—over 40,000 portraits, and so on. It became a cross-cultural archive of people’s stories from different backgrounds, ages and genders.

That was the point: a growing archive that could become a resource for people to learn from. A lot of the stories are deeply personal—trauma and how someone got through it, whether that was about gender, sexuality, violence. They weren’t all “scary” stories, but they were challenging stories.

One girl was struck by lightning and was in a coma for six months. Her story was interesting—how the world went on around her, how she had to relearn herself, and how she had no fear anymore. She felt that if she could survive electricity surging through her, she could survive anything. It gave her a positive way to approach life afterwards.

So yes, I recorded more and more stories as it travelled, and that was a valuable part of the work.

Participation, consent and ethics in story-based interactive art

Robin: Around recording those stories—how did you manage consent?

Georgie: I was with the work always, so none of those stories were automatically captured without oversight.

We did design an automatic section where people could go in, the camera would turn on, and they could record until they were happy, then submit. But what we found was it was better that I travelled with the work and did the filming. It became a one-on-one filmed process that we worked through.

When it was automatic, we had a sign with the didactic: if you go into this booth, you’re allowing your face and story to be used, but only in the context of the artwork. There was always an email option—you could enter your email address, and before a story was loaded into the archive it was signed off by the storyteller.

That was important.

And ethically—having your face captured as a portrait—we did record faces as we travelled, but we no longer save them to the archive. That means nobody’s faces are stored.

When you come down to it, cameras around cities are snapping your face millions of times a day. So the idea that your face is going to get stolen and used for something—honestly, that ship has sailed. Now with AI, it’s a different world.

We’re using data that’s very different, and as long as that data is anonymised, I don’t think there’s a problem because no one can tie it to your identity.

Robin: There’s also something interesting about empathy in the way you record something—working with someone and making a connection to them. The stories probably shift as well.

Georgie: Yeah. What I found really interesting about Echo is that when we go through life, when we hear intimate personal stories, most of the time they’re from family, close friends, or people we’ve known for a long time.

What’s great about Echo is that people are getting an emotional education. They’re getting an intimate story from somebody they never would have come across in real life. With that broad range of stories, it gives people an inside view—a personal, emotional view.

And it does the opposite of the echo chamber of social media, where we only see things we like or agree with—things come into our feed that reinforce our existing views.

So it’s valuable to have intimate access to what another person feels when you wouldn’t normally get access to it. It’s good for breaking down bias and prejudice, which is important as we become more polarised and things trend towards conflict. People are being played off each other.

Robin: This piece wasn’t set up as a touring piece…?

Georgie: I always had touring in mind. That’s why I made it a booth—so it could be packed down and transported. It didn’t rely on a room or a fixed infrastructure. I planned for it to tour and to grow as an archive.

I actually have two booths. One is a solid wood installation piece with all the bells and whistles. When you come out, a photo drops down like an actual photo booth—of you merging with that person’s story. That’s the high-end gallery version.

Then I have a corflute version—a structure with an aluminium framework and walls that get attached. That one can be packed down and moved fairly easily.

So yes, it was designed to tour and grow as an archive.

Robin: Are you going to do anything else with the archive?

Georgie: In 2022, during COVID, the Queensland Museum commissioned a version for the World Science Festival Brisbane. They didn’t want the booth version because they were worried about queues and congestion.

So I created a seven-metre geometric face sculpture that sat on South Bank, visible from all over the city and from the river. I projected the stories onto that sculpture. So from an intimate space, the stories became very public—intimate stories in a public space.

At that point I added an idea: narcissism versus empathy. The audience could capture their own face with a console, and their face would go up on the head in real time. They could break it down into pixels and play with effects.

But I had a remote control in my pocket, and I’d glitch it back to the stories—constantly drawing people in with the idea that their face would be massive, then taking them back to the empathy of the stories.

So the work has had lots of different iterations. Now I feel I’d like to recreate it with the tech available today, so it’s even more immersive—and the relationship with Echo, the protagonist that drives the experience, can be more two-way and interactive.

I think there’s a lot of potential for this work in human rights contexts, in schools, to educate about bullying, so you can see from two sides. I think it could be a great tool to take to aged-care facilities too. I’d love to do interviews with people living there, and have their legacy live on. That would be a beautiful project. That’s when I’ve got some time outside of everything else.

Walk-up participation and prototyping: UI, affordances and accessibility across ages

Robin: More generally about your practice: how do you test and prototype projects?

Georgie: I work a lot with myself, and with Dorian—he’s been my right-hand person. We’re in the studio jumping around in front of Kinect cameras, testing things back and forth. We mainly work with TouchDesigner and Unity. For Kinect: Azure Kinect DK.

Testing does require getting some strangers in—people who aren’t familiar with the work—to check if the UI is accessible. That’s really important. I always try to make sure the user experience can be understood by a five-year-old and a sixty-year-old, because it has to be instinctive. That requires honing.

It’s about getting people in, seeing where the roadblocks are, and noticing that icon needs to be bigger, or there needs to be an affordance—maybe a sound that draws people to a place.

With my public works, I often have performers performing with the work. The work might run for two weeks, then on weekends I have performers who essentially show the audience how to use it. I’ve found that’s a powerful way to do it without breaking the dramaturgy of the work—you’re not standing there instructing people. It creates multiple entry points, and it’s more subtle and more beautiful.

So there are different ways of testing and showing audiences how to drive and navigate the work.

Robin: You really love that idea—that the guidance is actually the performance. That dual role: being part of the piece, but also inviting interaction.

Georgie: Yeah. It becomes another layer because performers use those audiovisual tools to create performance and movement. It produces another outcome of the work, which is really good.

Robin: Most media artists work collaboratively. Does your role stay the same in most projects, or does it shift depending on the nature of the project?

Georgie: I direct the work. My practice is very iterative—one project feeds another and another. It feels like one long artwork translated in different ways.

I design the world. I’ll play with something, and something will come out of it. If I’m having a lot of fun playing with it, I’m usually pretty sure the audience will find it intriguing.

I design the aesthetic, the content, and the world the work exists within. I pretty much always make the sound, because sound is a really important part of my practice. It sets the tone and personality of the world.

Then I’ll bring in somebody like Dorian—he’s also an audiovisual artist—who brings ideas to other layers. Then we might bring in a software developer, sometimes a sculptor or fabricator. There’s also the performance side, and then sound engineering.

I work a lot with Mr. Clark for sound engineering. It’s important to me that everyone gets something creative out of the work—that they’re not just brought in to operate. They get to bring part of themselves into it.

Robin: They become collaborators.

Georgie: Yeah, exactly.

Robin: It was the first time I’d had someone use the word “fabricator”. I didn’t like it—it felt very operational.

Georgie: Yeah, it is very operational. I think that’s the corporate world seeping in.

Robin: I was talking with an architect as well, so that’s a different world.

Georgie: Architects like to think they’re the only creatives on the project, I think. But there are lots of other layers.

Robin: If you think back to some of the collaborations—how did they begin?

Georgie: Brisbane is a very creative city, and the people I maintain contact with socially are generally creative. I like friendships that extend beyond catching up for dinner or a drink—I like to work on projects and co-create projects with people.

If I get a budget, I’ll pull my mates into the project because they’re the best at what they do. If you can communicate well, and there’s mutual respect, you get incredible outcomes.

And I want to give my friends work—if I’ve got a budget, I want them involved. That’s how collaborations come about. They bring me in on their projects; I bring them in on mine.

I have a company called Interac. (If this is the studio “Interactor”, here’s the link.) Interactor.

Does that answer your question?

Robin: What are you working on at the moment?

Georgie: I’ve got a couple of ideas I’m pushing through that I can’t talk about, but I can give you a sense.

I’m working on the runway towards the Olympics—a big-scale, epic event spectacle with interactive pieces. They’re in progress at the moment, pulling in partners and funding.

I’m also developing an AR experience with my partner—combining sport and art—with the intention of getting kids off devices and moving in space, gaming with their bodies. My partner is a world champion fighter, so we’re bringing sport and art together in an exciting way.

There’s another project I can’t go into too much detail about, but I’m working towards building things that create a lot of change.

Robin: It sounds like an exciting mix of things—evolution—and it’s great to hear about the Olympics work as well.

Georgie: Thank you. It’s a great opportunity to work with bigger budgets and really experiment with big scale public art.

Robin: For other artists thinking about working in media and public spaces, what advice would you offer?

Georgie: Working in public space is the hardest frontline you can do. It’s the hardest because, first of all, you can’t build a linear narrative in the same way you might in theatre or in a venue. You don’t control lighting; you don’t control a lot of things.

The way people move through your work is unpredictable. They can arrive at any time. They might stay for a minute, or half an hour, or an hour. So the narrative—the way you structure story and meaning—needs to be really thought about.

Secondly, look at your demographic—what kind of people, what age groups will be moving through. I’m not saying tailor your content to that demographic. I’m saying make sure there are access points into the work that are appealing—ways to help people understand what you’re trying to say.

And it’s challenging in terms of security. You’ve got to have everything locked down, otherwise it gets stolen, graffitied, weed on, smashed—whatever. It’s not the easiest space to work in. There are people who are disrespectful of art and don’t care.

But I’ve found over time that if you make something really powerful, people generally respect it and leave it alone. There’s always one or two who want to vandalise it, though.

What I love about working in that space is inviting the audience in as a co-author. It’s lovely watching the moment when it dawns on them that they can change the work. You see the expression: “Oh my God—I’m able to change that.” But then it’s changed me.

That’s when you know you’ve made a really successful work: it’s gone both ways. It’s allowed someone to express themselves and step out of self-consciousness into flow state—pure play. You see them expressing themselves fluidly, and connecting with strangers around them because they’re all doing something together at the same time.

That’s one of the most satisfying things I get out of working in public space, in an interactive space—allowing the audience into the work. It’s really powerful to watch.

Posted 16-05-2026