Dancing through Time: An Interactive Installation to Discover a Dance Audiovisual Archive

Dancing through Time is an interactive installation created to discover the Prix de Lausanne archive, a collection of dance performance recordings over 51 years. It consists of a 4k-touch screen mounted on a 12-meter rail, offering visitors the opportunity to walk through the 51 editions of the Prix de Lausanne dance competition. This article presents the installation and the results of an extensive evaluation on users’ questionnaires. Our main findings validate Dancing through Time in terms of User Experience and User Engagement, indicating that receiving prior instructions only affects the latter. Furthermore, the interaction logs with the application inform us on the benefits on browsing through the entire collection, increasing watch time and distance travelled through time. Finally, we extracted different users’ interaction behaviors to better understand how visitors engaged with Dancing through Time in the situated context of the 2024 edition.