Manufacturing Video
. Top.
Manufacturing Video
“Manufacturing Video” is a work in progress. Concept and programming with Jamie Allen.
Augmented reality, Projection mapping, we are looking to subvert these ideas. These manufactured realities ignore the fact they are manufactured.
We decided to play with the notion of the screen. By moving it to the floor, an inglorious position, the hope is to lose the primacy of the image. By sticking the projection into the corner, we moved away from a traditional aspect ratio (4:3), and while we allowed the shape to be defined by the image, it happened in an unexpected way.
Using mirrors we were able to bend and manipulate light further, turning the whole thing into a factory.
By creating rules, we explicitly controlled how light was created in the work.
trigger
. Top.
Trigger is the winning submission for a permanent installation in the University of Oslo’s new Computer Science building. It was created as a collaboration between Vibeke Jensen and myself. You can see the website here.
The installation deals with issues surrounding surveillance, placing the movements of people inside the building on the exterior in an abstracted fashion. It enables individuals to choose if they will be observed or not, indicating the life within the structure.
750 Cafe
. Top.
Architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed a new cafeteria for magazine publisher Conde Nast. The space was designed as a “light spa,” with 75,000 RGB LEDs from Color Kinetics. I wrote the software that runs the space, and designed the current lighting setup.
Hans Steiner and Evan Raskob also contributed to the programming, writing a php based web interface and a 3d abstraction tool.
LSSL
. Top.
This was another collaborative project dealing with sound in space. I did most of the network programming as well as some sound design.
There is some video here.
Locus Sonus, the audio art research group I work with, created an installation using the virtual world Second Life. For the Seconde Nature festival in Aix-en-Provence, we recreated a portion of the courtyard of the Cité du Livre, where the installation physically existed, in Second Life. This representation of the real world was joined to a series of rooms in the virtual space. Inside the rooms were a number of object that denizens of Second Life could move about. Each of these objects created a unique sound.The objects’ sound was reverberated through the virtual space and played back in the physical space of the installation. When objects were moved into the recreated space of the Cité du Livre, the sound was spatialized as if they were moving around in the physical world. The audio from the real world was streamed back into Second Life, completing the fusion of the virtual and real spaces.
Technically, this required getting the coordinates of the object in Second Life, sending them to a webserver, which then passed the data to a Pure Data patch that ran the audio into the real space. A microphone picked up the sound and streamed it back into Second Life.
You can read more about the project here, see the code used, and check out some conclusions I drew based on the experience.
rift
. Top.
rift is an interactive video installation that frees the viewer to move physically through the recorded time of video. visitors engage the projected image alternately as explorers, navigating recorded time with their movements, and as painters, using their gestures as strokes on the video canvas. Timelapse video footage is fed through custom software that translates motion through the space of the installation into motion through the timeline of the video.
rift was conceived and developed by doron altaratz, scott fitzgerald, and eric socolofsky. It was initially installed at T-Minus 2005, a timelapse video show held at Synchronicity Space, New York City, February 2005. It was also been installed in the lobby of the Tisch School of the Arts and the great wall of Oakland (2009).
temporal navigation
video is an excellent medium for recording change over time. viewers are typically limited to experiencing these changes in a two-dimensional and linear fashion, displayed on a flat screen at a constant speed. rift is an interactive video installation that frees the viewer to move physically through the recorded time of video.
an image of a place at one moment in time is projected on a wall in the installation. a camera is trained on the space in front of the projection, through which visitors move. silhouettes appear gradually as visitors move in front of the camera. the longer one remains in an area, the further that area of the image progresses through time. participants often take an exploratory role in the piece, sampling moments in time from the recorded space. however, some become painterly, allowing their gestures to describe arcs of color and motion across the projected image.
spatial experience is always defined by the moment of inhabitation. one physical location may seem vastly different from one point in time to the next. in the space defined by rift, visitors gain access to the wealth of places previously isolated at given moments in time.
construction
rift began as a series of timelapse videos, each one day long, recorded in new york city, brooklyn, and elsewhere. this footage was reduced to a sequence of frames, which are fed into a custom software engine, built with cycling74′s max/jitter.
an infrared camera picks up visitors’ motion through the space of the installation, which is then fed into the software engine. areas of the projected image that correspond to the areas of motion in the camera’s field of view are manipulated depending on the amount of change; the longer an area of the installation registers change, the further forward in the timeline of the video that area of the projection moves. when that area of the installation is vacated, the corresponding area of the projection cycles back toward the beginning of the video’s timeline.
the engine also allows for interchangability of the timelapse footage. in its initial installation, the timelapse video footage was switched automatically every night. over the course of the installation, rift ran through 13 different locations, allowing visitors to explore the time-space of multiple locations over successive visits.
Rock Yourself
. Top.
A collaboration with Michael Sharon and Manlio LoConte, the installation was shown at Ask the Robot in spring 2005. The installation allowed participants to create their own musical score based on their body’s position in the space. Ultraviolet LEDs were arranged on the wall behind the entrance to the space. Each light represented a track on a sequencer. As visitors passed in front of the lights, various prerecorded audio tracks were keyed off. Through experimentation in physical space, individuals could create a unique aural experience.
The application was written in Max/MSP/Jitter and used a webcam for tracking a person against the lights. A simple change triggered the playback of an audio loop. Essentially we created a 16-track sequencer using space, and not a physical object.
Twitchy Fingers
. Top.
Twitchy Fingers is a live video installation that is a modern funhouse mirror, warping and distorting our reflection.
As seen in the pages of IdN magazine
The video appears as a living piece of graffiti or live illustration. The initial image slowly recedes into the background of the display and is overwritten with a new representation of what is captured on a camera.
Twitchy Fingers has been displayed at the following :
Please Be Seated
. Top.
I programmed Nicole Cohen’s piece “Please be Seated” at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. While I may not think much of LA in general, the Getty is a pretty nice place.
The installation recreates 6 chairs from the Getty’s permanent collection, all done in white. The originals were then photographed, and a cinematographer (Michael Merriman) filmed the locations in France where the chairs were originally located.
The images of the original chairs were composited into the footage. This footage plays in a loop on monitors placed above the replica chairs. As you approach and sit in the recreated chair, you see yourself in the video, inhabiting 18th century France.
The programming was done in Max/MSP/Jitter, utilizing background subtraction, and a bit of chromakeying to eliminate some of the peskier shadows.