A computer controlled spotlight projects a cone of light when a person enters the space. It pulses and flickers based on a person’s distance to the light, emitting a crackling, watery noises as the light changes. The closer to the centre of the light, the more chaotic the sounds become. It is an experiment in making light tangible, through sound.

Here’s a video of the installation in action:

Introduction

While the Gross National Happiness (GNH) of Bhutan has been criticised for being naïve and an attempt to deflect attention from the material poverty of its people, there is no doubt that its citizens have benefited from the emphasis on well-being and the environment their king has instituted. The advent of television and Internet has nevertheless raised questions of the fragility of this so called “Last Shangri-La”. Part of the success of the King’s GNH is based on the preservation of traditional customs and culture which the spectre of materialism inherent in both on-line and broadcast media threatens to unravel.

The smile detection machine in Thimphu.

Description

Grand Mutual Smiles is an installation that explored networked mediated happiness through an international smile exchange.The project captured the smiles of people and transmitted them across the Internet to display them in the city of Linz in Austria and Thimphu in Bhutan. Using cameras equipped with smile detection technology, installations in both cities progressively captured pictures of smiling people, displaying them both locally and remotely. In both cities the pictures of smiling Bhutanese and smiling Austrians were projected on video screens. The motivation was to encourage people from the respective countries to communicate with each other across the Internet in a non-verbal and humoristic way, by smiling.

Website & Photos

The project website can be found here: http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/grand_mutual_smiles/. The website describes the project in more depth and contains a large selection of smiles capture by the installations in both Austria and Bhutan.

Video Documentation

Here is a video of the opening of the Grand Mutual Smiles installation in Clocktower square, Thimphu, Bhutan, on the 17th June 2009.
The proceedings were opened by Her Royal Highness Ashi Chimi Yangzom Wangchuck.

Frame Seductions is an interactive work that plays with our expectations of the video frame by creating an immersive and surreal space that lies beyond the traditional borders of the screen.

The project explores the concept of looking outside of the video frame by tracking the head movements of people immediately in front of a camera-enabled screen. As people turn their head to the left or to the right the perspective of the video on the screen will change to follow their gaze.

In the language of cinema, hors champ (out of scene) is considered to be the space and time of the filmic world outside of the range of the camera. Viewers of Frame Seductions are able to access material outside of the initial scene, blurring the boundaries between the frame and the hors champ. Lurking in the sidelines of the original scene, various mundane but provocative scenarios are playing themselves out much to the surprise of the viewer.

The Frame Seductions installation in Lima

Description

In the 21st century the concept of the frame persists in incarnations both old and new in painting, video, television, and cinema. Today, in the face of a steadily growing plethora of screens, projections and LCD’s the content of the frame has the ability not only to animate but through technological contrivance to also respond to our movements and gaze.

This project is exhibited as a video depiction of several ordinary scenes in the tradition of genre painting. Genre painting or photography depicts aspects of everyday life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities. In Frame Seductions however the actions of the people in the scene are often mysterious or nonsensical, creating a slightly surreal, magic-realist atmosphere. Characters appear in several places at once, exit through doors to only reappear elsewhere and are often seen giving the viewer or each other quizzical looks.

The installation plays back panoramic video, of a width much larger than the screen frame itself. The screen acts as a window into this larger panorama, and the head movements of a person just in front of the screen causes the focus of the viewing window to shift either to the left or to the right, exposing new material.

The installation appears as a static looking picture from a distance, however as people approach closer they are given the opportunity to peer into the sidelines of the image revealing dynamic ‘hidden’ scenes. In addition, the ’side-lines’ play sound, whereas the central image is relatively silent, teasing people into looking out of the central frame in order to locate the source of the noises.

Video material for the screen was shot using actors, using multiple camera perspectives to achieve a panoramic effect and then processed by software. At any one time the panorama consists of three videos played back side by side asynchronously. Each video is looped seamlessly, occasionally swapping out when not visible to be replaced by new content. The algorithm controlling the selection of the videos takes into account the content of the videos and the perspective of the viewer, i.e. which part of the scene they are currently watching. Tracking of the viewer’s head is achieved using proprietary 6-degrees-of-freedom head-tracking software.

Videos

A video of the installation can be viewed here:

A demonstration of the software can viewed here:

Credits

• Pierre Proske – Concept, direction, programming.
• André Mintz (Brazil)- Video processing and consulting.
• Federico Andrade (Argentina), member of the Modular collective – Art direction, dramaturgy, photography.

Support

This project would not have been possible without the support from the following institutions:

An Australia Council Visual Arts board development grant assisted in the background research of the technologies involved in the project, while Medialab-Prado assisted in the first realisation of the piece at the Magic & Technology Interactivos workshop in Lima, Peru.

The essence of this piece is a large monolithic dark wall that is represented both in the real and virtual worlds. It is a one-way portal to the virtual world through which people can whisper their thoughts, scream their frustrations and convey regret without the privilege of reply. It is a wailing wall through which to mourn the loss of our humanity to the virtual network.

CATERWAUL is an interactive sound installation that operates as a one way “portal” to Second Life via the Internet. A physical wall in operates as a totemic locus of grief. People approach it with intent to wail and mourn. The mourners grieve their lost loved ones who spend more time in virtual and on-line worlds than they do communicating in real life. The cacophony of the lamentation is recorded by hidden microphones in the wall, transmitted across the Internet and piped out of an “identical” wall in the virtual world Second Life (http://secondlife.com). A website displaying a simulation of the wall allows other people, on the threshold of “real” and “second” life, to vicariously eavesdrop the wailing.

Project webpage: http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/caterwaul/

In human speech the basic acoustic unit is called a phoneme. The visual equivalent is called a “viseme”, a basic speech unit in the visual domain, in other words a facial expression that can be used to describe a particular sound. Using this analogy, I have written a piece of software which describes sound using basic visual units to represent recorded frequencies.

My inspiration for a basic visual unit came to me while staring at a wall where I had hung up three Japanese fabrics covered with repeating iconic motifs. Here was an already established set of visual patterns comprised of small repeating elements.

These textile motifs seem appropriate for use in a computer artwork as they are already tiled in a networked, matrix fashion and their morphology resembles miniaturized automata. Woven textiles form part of computing history, through Joseph Marie Jacquard’s automated patterned textile weaving machine in 1804 which led to punch cards in computing devices.