Research on Relevant Sample

Research on Relevant Sample


Make Like a Tree

As viewers walk in front of the Make Like a Tree’s projected wall, their shadows are recorded and converted to wondering shadows in the background that move between trees that will disappear suddenly or fade away slowly.





Falling Girl
Falling Girl is an immersive interactive narrative installation that allows the viewer to participate in the story of a young girl falling from a skyscraper. During her slow descent, the girl reacts to the people and events in each window. Daylight fades, night falls and passes and at dawn, the falling girl finally lands on the sidewalk. By the time she lands on the sidewalk, she is no longer a young woman, but had changed into an elderly woman. This shows that the story of her life from her young age till the moment she died in an abstract way. In this tale, it shows about the shortness of our lives and the events that often occupy us.

The project is collaborating between interactive media artist Scott Snibbe and choreographer filmmaker Annie Loui.



Outward Mosaic

Outward Mosaic was installed at London Institute of Contemporary Arts Café as part of a solo show in 2006. When people walked in front of a recording surface on the lower floor, their silhouettes were recorded and placed into the composite mosaic projected on the upper floor. This projection, visible from below and from the upper floor area, became part of the daily social life of the space, and also gave people above clue of what was happening at the floor below. Outward Mosaic sorted the movements of shadows, so that leftward movements appeared in the left tiles and rightward movements appeared in the right tiles, creating an overall outward flow from the center.




Center Mosaic

Central Mosaic, part of the mosaic series, records the shadows of people as they walk in front of a projection screen and replays them in silhouette. The recordings move out towards the edges and become smaller as new recordings take their place.



Shadow Bag
As a viewer walks across the beam of an interactive projection, Shadow Bag captures his shadow and re-projects it onto a screen with unpredictable variation. Sometimes there is no response: the projector acts merely as a light source casting the viewer’s true shadow; sometimes a disembodied copy of the viewer’s shadow comes immediately towards him from the other side; at other times, the shadow follows him, often without his knowledge. The responding shadow might be the viewer’s and at other times someone who came before. Occasionally when a viewer touches one of these disembodied shadows, it collapses like a corpse. The title of the work refers to Carl Jung’s use of shadow as a psychological term to describe unconscious selves.



Chien
In Visceral Cinema: Chien viewers interact with a re-interpretation of the surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. The work combines key moments from the film with viewers’ shadows to form interactive projections. Initially, viewers see a large video projection of a man pulling a grand piano towards the viewer. When viewers walk between the projector and the projection, their shadows affect the projected man’s actions. Viewers can cause the man to strain harder and loses ground or when touching the man, cause him to dissolve into ants that gradually overtake the entire screen. An application of surrealist techniques to an interactive projection, Chien plays with viewers’ sense of image, representation, shadow, body, and self.

This work is part of a larger series of interactive wall projections that are based on masterpieces of experimental film. Each work focuses on aspects of these films that lodged in the artist’s mind, rather than on a literal revisiting of the work. These memories often turn out to be incorrect, or wholly imagined, when compared with the original film. This working process mirrors the surrealist creative methods of probing the unconscious.



Cause and Effect

Cause and Effect records viewers’ movements in silhouette as they simultaneously displace the recordings of previous viewers. When the movies re-play on sliding tiles, only the viewers' movements are shown, giving a sense of autonomy to actions that were actually determined through interaction with the prior recordings. "Cause and effect" is a common translation for the Buddhist term Karma, which dictates that all human experiences, however minute, are the result of their own prior actions.




Deep Walls

Deep Walls is a projected cabinet of cinematic memories. When a person walks into its projection beam, the interactive wall starts recording his shadow, and the shadows of those who follow. When the last person leaves the frame, the shadows replay within one of sixteen small rectangular cupboards, looping indefinitely. Like structuralism films, the collection of repetitive videos becomes an object unto-itself, rather than strictly representational “movie.”

Deep Walls creates a complex temporal relationship between movie loops. Each small shadow-film has the precise duration of its recording: from a few seconds to several hours. The temporal relationship between the sixteen frames becomes complex—in a manner similar to Brian Eno’s tape loop experiments—looping individual recordings of different durations to create a composition that doesn’t repeat for days.

Deep Walls is inspired by the surrealist films of Jan Svankmajer and the Quay Brothers, and the sculpture of Joseph Cornell. In their films and sculptures, small bodies and obsessive collections of objects into cabinets and drawers represent psychological and spiritual states. The rational process of organization brings out an unconscious irrationality.

Deep Walls’ name is inspired by a design pattern from architect Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language. He recommends building the walls of homes thick, so that the inhabitants themselves can carve out cabinets, drawers, and windows to personalize their homes. In the spirit of Alexander, this work gradually remembers the contents of its environment upon its surface.



Shadow
Shadow flips the relationship between audience and screen, making the audience active and the screen receptive. At first it just a normal shadow projected onto a screen when viewers move in front of the projector, and it cast the viewer’s shadow on the screen. After viewers move out of the projected beam’s path, however the movements of their shadows are repeated over and over and gradually fading away and returning to the no projection on the screen. In this way, viewers experience their shadows separated from their physical bodies, with a life of their own.