movement

VIDEOPLACE is a responsive video projection environment mapping users movements and actions in a real-time build etween 1975 and 1984. The system is Krueger's first implementation of an Artifical Reality enivronment, an interactive immersive environment where the user get in contact with the virtual without any use of googles or other interface devices.

The works GLOW FLOW, META PLAY, and PSYCHIC SPACE were the precursors to the VIDEOPLACE environment, which now of comes with 25 different programs.

"Two people in different rooms, each containing a projection screen and a video camera, were able to communicate through their projected images in a «shared space» on the screen. No computer was involved in the first Environment in 1975. In order to realize his ideas of an «artificial reality» he [Krueger] started to develop his own computer system in the years up to 1984, mastering the technical problems of image recognition, image analysis and response in real time. This system meant that he could now combine live video images of visitors with graphic images, using various programs to modify them. When «Videoplace» is shown today, visitors can interact with 25 different programs or interaction patterns. A switch from one program to another usually takes place when a new person steps in front of the camera. But the «Videoplace» team has still not achieved its ultimate aim of developing a program capable of learning independently."

(Source: Media Art Net work record)

Untitled 5 is the fifth interactive installation in theExternal Measures Series, which Utterback has been developing since 2001. The goal of these works is to create an aesthetic system which responds fluidly and intriguingly to physical movement in the exhibit space. The installations respond to their environment via input from an overhead video camera. Custom video tracking and drawing software outputs a changing wall projection in response to the activities in the space. The existence, positions, and behaviors of various parts of the projected image depend entirely on people’s presence and movement in the exhibit area.

Untitled 5 creates imagery that is painterly, organic, and evocative while still being completely algorithmic. To create this work, Utterback first develops sets of animated marks whose parameters and behaviors are controlled by people’s movements. Then, out of a working ‘palette’ of these animated marks, she composes an overall composition. The composition balances responses whose logic is immediately clear, with responses that feel connected to viewer’s movements, but whose logic remains complex and mysterious.

Integral to the piece are the animated mark’s cumulative interaction with each other over time. As a person moves through the space, a colored line maps his or her trajectory across the projection. When a person leaves the installation, their trajectory line is transformed by an overlay of tiny organic marks. These marks can now be pushed from their location by other people’s movement in the space. Displaced trajectory marks attempt to return to their original location, creating smears and streaks of color as they move. The resulting swaths of color occur at the intersections between current and previous motion in the space, elegantly connecting different moments of time. This is just one of the behavioral elements of the composition.

While the specific rules of the system are never explicitly revealed to participants, the internal structure and composition of the piece can be discovered through a process of kinesthetic exploration. Engaging with this work creates a visceral sense of unfolding or revelation, but also a feeling of immediacy and loss. The experience of this work is the experience of embodied existence itself – a continual flow of unique and fleeting moments. The effect is at once sensual and contemplative.

"Sky and Wires: At Home and Homeless" is a response to a contemporary life of engaging with places not as a space to be, but as a space to chart a trajectory through.

Artist Statemenet:The conceptual focus of my work is the synthesis of ideas from cartography, information theory and phenomenology. It exists in a space between the footsteps of the walker, the pulse of a neuron, and the progress of civilization. I'm interested in perspectives different from human-centered values and experiences. A signal isn’t given meaning only upon the receiver’s understanding of it. Noise is part of the signal. A page of random characters contains more information than a Shakespeare sonnet. Formally, monotonous structures and extended crescendos induce near-hypnoidal states, while acknowledging the more aggressive aspects of contemporary life. The conflict between movement and stillness is always present. These aspects take intermedial forms, foregrounding the interplay of sonic and visual elements.

(Source: 2008 ELO Media Arts show)

(S)PACING is a poetic performance piece that reflects upon the nervous habit of pacing and ideas of internal dialogue while walking as a source of poetic inspiration and contemplation, if not procrastination. The application for performance can either be played on the keyboard, or use live video motion tracking to access and combine screen-based still image, video, text, and audio content. The title of the piece refers not only to the act of pacing but also to pacing as a measure of time. The addition of the (s) at the beginning of the title, rendering the title spacing, could be said to refer not only to the locative and defamiliarizing spatial variations in the piece but also to formal aspects of poetry such as meter, feet, line breaks and stanzas. Though the performance, the actions of the performer may be fundamentally pedestrian they are put in contrast with mental and poetic machination in terms of the poetic output generated by the movement. In effect, the performer develops a system of, and has live action control over the scansion of the generated poem while handing over control of the vocalizations, imagery, and textual display to the application. The work made its debut at ePoetry 2009 (Barcelona), and was presented in installation form at ePoetry 2011 (Buffalo)

"Dig" by Steve Duffy uses Javascript to create an elegant representation of verbal conflict in simple white text on black background. Through the use of floating frames and marquees, the harsh reality of "digs," or emotional, sarcastic jabs at a person, are cleverly represented in a case where less is more. The absence of audio allows for readers to focus where they should: the startling white text scrolling quickly along the black background. The text also moves at varying speeds from left to right and right to left, creating an interesting visual experience.

Readers get a sense of the conflict through passages like, “Everything you tell me is true but you lie lie lie," and "No-words mean more than some words. Each word worms its way out of things… Here is the blind mole driven to dig. I'm a poor creature, deluded, digging in the text. I don't believe a word of it." As the text flows in both directions, Duffy illustrates how people can dig themselves deeper and deeper as arguments escalate.

(Source: Electronic Literature Directory entry by Joy Jeffers)

Tryptich interactive video installation, layering sound and video. As installation, a user would trigger the different speakers by walking in front of one of three screens. Dealing with the myth of Orpheus and Euridyce.

"Canticle" was written for Brown University's CAVE immersive virtual reality environment. Like a concerto, it was composed in three movements and arranged for collaborative performance between a solo user and programmed VR environment. In "Canticle", The CAVE system and its user operate in concert: rendering the world through cooperation and opposition. The tone of "Canticle" plays upon the spectacle of VR by inducing an aesthetic environment that is overly saturated despite its basic composition of greyscale letterforms. Evocative text and audio were used to assist this effect: "The Song of Solomon" and Nico Muhly's MotherTongue. A study of "The Song" resonated with the project's themes: the seduction of spectacle and awareness of a physical body within immersive spaces of illusion. Movements were written in response to spectacles that are native to the CAVE. Description of each movement refers to the specific quality of spectacle it explores: periphery, reactivity, stereoscopy, interface, depth or immersion. Along with the author’s original poetry about spectacle, the piece is also comprised of selections from the "Song of Solomon" processed by a computer program written by the author. Output from the program was then edited for form and content. The body of the text is available in the pdf below; however, because Cave Writing promotes spatial hypertext, the text is not likely to be encountered in the CAVE in the linear order presented. In the video documentation of "Movement 1: When the Eye" Asmina Chremos dances the physical gesture of reading through the interface of the CAVE. Her exquisite movements focus on the discrepancy between what the person wearing the tracking glasses sees and what the audience reads. For example, midway through the performance, the text is programmed to evade the dancer as she tries to engage with it: the text is programmed to only be legible to the audience outside the CAVE.

(Source: http://samanthagorman.net/Canticle)

A later version of The Legible City (1989) encompasses all the experiences offered by the original version, but introduces an important new multi-user functionality that to a large extent becomes its predominant feature. In the Distributed Legible City there are two or more bicyclists at remote locations who are simultaneously present in the virtual environment.They can meet each other (by accident or intentionally), see abstracted avatar representations of each other, and when they come close to each other they can verbally communicate with each other.While the Distributed Legible City shows the same urban textual landscape as the original Legible City, this database now takes on a new meaning. The texts are no longer the sole focus of the user's experience, but instead becomes the con_text (both in terms of scenery and content) for the possible meetings and resulting conversations (meta_texts) between the bicyclists. In this way a rich new space of co-mingled spoken and readable texts is generated. In other words the artwork changes from being merely a visual experience, into becoming a visual ambiance for social exchange between visitors to that artwork.As a result of the increasingly ubiquitous nature of the Internet and the maturing of 3D interaction techniques, there is a growing need to define aesthetic frameworks for the technological development of new social interaction and interface paradigms for content rich, inter-connected, shared virtual environments. The Legible City has been used as a context to explore these issues, adding a space of distributed multi-user social engagement to the space of interactive spectacle. This paradigm is a novel one for art, embedding and transforming its representational practices in the the new and evolving net condition.

(Source: Shaw's description from project page)