projection

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.

B A C K L I T seeks to invite the recombination of word and image from translocal communities of conversants on diverse e-list servers, Facebook, and Twitter. Members of list­‐servers are asked to send both an image and a text of no more than 140 characters to performer, and to do so in response to thought processes/actions given rise to by the phrase "Remediating the Social". The performer will recombine those elements. The piece itself is simple, complexity will be generated by the volume of submissions.

“The Office Diva” is an audio-visual installation; a large scale projection of a computer-controlled character living in a claustrophobic virtual space and compulsively talking. Conceptually, the project is a reproduction and examination of a consciousness ruled by manic-depression. But she is also a machine, and the work plays with the ways in which mad and machinic behavior can manifest in similar ways. Phoebe Sengers argues that the modular design of some intelligent agents makes them hard to understand, they appear to be a schizoid assemblage of random, unmotivated behaviors. Contariwise the computational limitations of other agents have been masked by their insane personalities. Repetitions, lack of affect, inappropriate responses, and non-sequiturs are signs of disturbed people as well as machines. In this project, we deliberately chose a bland machine voice, that speaks the stream-of-consciousness text which is generated, re-ordered and reassembled by a machinic algorithm. But, just as deliberately, we massage the relationship between text and code so that our ”mad” consciousness is not so badly fragmented and fractured as to be indecipherable to a human audience. Over time the bland voice reveals a mad, sad story: a pedestrian story of a receptionist; a perfectionist who works too hard in her small therapy center; a critical observer who sees too much going wrong and strives to fix it; an office Don Quixote tilting at the windmalls of petty inefficiency and corruption; a woman slowing exploding. The voice comes from the psychic emanation of the Office Diva: a larger than life projection of her ego. The graphics represent another synthesis between machine and human; procedural animation creates the flaming or dripping archetype that forms into a dimly human form, that is then reanimated with motion capture. The Diva’s anima swirls chaotically in response to the internal narratives she retells so intently. She drifts in the dimly seen and utterly mundane office environment that has taken on so much overdetermined significance.

(The ELO 2102 Media Art Show.)

"Re:Positioning Fear" was the third relational architecture project. A large scale installation on the Landeszeughaus military arsenal with a "teleabsence" interface of projected shadows of passers-by. Using tracking systems, the shadows were automatically focused and generated sounds. A real-time IRC discussion about the transformation of the concept of "fear" was projected inside the shadows; the chat involved 30 artists and theorists from 17 countries and the proceedings can be seen at the project web site. Source: Author's website.

Halo is composed of four interactive video projections using very powerful high resolution video projectors and four computers with an infra-red remote visual sensing system for viewer interaction. On each screen is visible a number of figures. Each figure is individually interactive, with the audience and with each other. The piece uses object oriented and behavioural programming techniques.

Each figure is individually interactive and the viewer is fully modelled within the interactive system. A gravity well forms around each viewer, attracting flying figures into their orbit. When the viewer approaches the screen the figures are 'pulled' down to earth, where instead of flying they walk in direct interaction with the viewer. A number of interactive texts using generative grammars, based on the textual works of William Blake, are visible on each screen.

(Source: Project description from Biggs's site)

Magnet is an interactive work employing remote visual sensing techniques and large scale digital video projection. Magnet employs two computers, two low light video cameras and two high resolution data projectors. The work also includes interactive quadraphonic audio.

The idea of the work came from a news story about Dutch scientists who levitated a frog four metres above the ground, without harm, using intense magnetic fields. This work imagines that other forces, such as fear or desire, might also achieve this end. The figures, approximately four metres tall, emerge from the floor of the gallery, hovering above the viewers. They also get stuck in the roof, just their dangling feet still visible. They can only be rescued through interaction with various of the other figures. Using realtime translucent digital layering techniques, the figures are able to merge with one another, creating further beings of arbitrary gender.

(Source: Artist's statement from the project site)

interactive large scale outdoor environment with non-linear language engine

The Castle is a large scale interactive video projection designed for specific architectural sites. The title makes reference to Kafka's novel of the same name, the work taking as its subject the incomprehensible character of systems of administration and power. The work is composed of four large independently interactive figures, reminiscent of public sculptures on public buildings. It also uses a crude grammar engine to generate short statements, which reflect the activity of the figures and that of the viewers.

(Source: Artist's statement from the project site)

interactive immersive installation with responsive language system

Presence is a three beam interactive video projection installation commissioned for the Art Machine II exhibition at the Maclellan Galleries, Glasgow. It is composed of three screens using high resolution video projectors and three computers with a remote visual sensing system for viewer interaction. On the main screen are visible a number of actors who are individually interactive with the audience and with each other. Another screen features an enormous upside down shadow, whilst another is composed of a giant talking mouth. The piece uses object oriented and behavioural programming techniques.