Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Anthony McCall 'Line Describing a Cone'

Another clever use of mist.
McCall's
1973 work 'Line Describing a Cone' was pivotal in terms of defining structural film and the viewer's interaction.




Anthony McCall Line Describing a Cone 1973
Installation view at the Musée de Rochechouart, 2007
Solid light installation, 30 minutes
16 mm film projector, haze machine

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Alternative video projection ideas

I'm exploring the idea of projection of a moving image onto mist, dust or fog, drawing attention to the illusion of cinema. This in turn would help create a space which viewers can navigate through and around, making the whole viewing process more of an experience.

Here are a couple of artworks I discovered which deal with projection onto impermanent surfaces:


Carsten Nicolai 'Fades' (2006) Installation in lightproof auditorium, video projection (16:9 ratio), mist, sound
the projected light hitting the mist particles create a light sculpture in three dimensional space.



Primal Source (video documentation) from haque d+r on Vimeo.
Primal Source (2008) is an outdoor interactive/performance installation. The piece is projected onto a large water/mist screen and responds to the sound waves produced by the audience.


The Liverpool Culture Company 'City of Light' (2005) video projection onto water
This also utilizes the large outdoor water screen and coloured laser lights, creating a 30 minture video.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Bjork 'Wanderlust' in 3D



Video for Bjork's 'Wanderlust' available in 3D on Wired.
Even quite beautiful without the aid of 3D anagylph glasses.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Daguerreotype Stereoportrait

A visit to the Otago Settlers Museum introduced me to the world of stereography as it existed long before the plastic viewmaster.
The Daguerreotype stereoportraits were often placed in special viewing kits, with lens that you could fold out and look through.



The most beautiful were the 'french tissue' ones, which were hand coloured and had little holes pierced into places on the subjects' clothes, so when held up to the light it appeared as though the image had jewel-like embellishments.

This is the viewer we used to look at various the images:


photo by Max Oettli Stereoscopic viewer and stereo Cyanotype

Monday, August 10, 2009

Siggraph - Touchable Holography

Presented at the 2009 Siggraph Emerging Technologies conference, this is just the beginning of something pretty revolutionary in the way we understand 3D imaging.



"Researchers at the University of Tokyo are working to create holographic displays that mimic the sensation of interacting with solid objects....researchers place a reflective marker on a person's hand and use Nintendo Wiimotes to track the position of the hand relative to the hologram. As the hand gets near the hologram, the display triggers a feedback mechanism, which feeds acoustic radiation pressure to the hand, creating the sensation that the person is touching an object. At the same time, the hologram reacts to the hand's position, and can be batted, grabbed, or floated based on the hand's position.
" -from I09

Monday, August 3, 2009

Got my milk, got my cookies, got my Viewmaster

Ever since I was little I was fascinated by the 'real' appearance of images inside of a Viewmaster.
Somehow those little discs could make everthing jump out, like you were actually in the image.

Stereoscopy (the technology utilized by the Viewmaster) is any technique capable of recording three-dimensional visual information or creating the an illusion of depth in an image.
The illusion of a 3D image is made possible by the viewmaster device which allows each eye to see a different image, distorting our binocular vision.

Under the umbrella of Stereoscopic imagery there's a bunch of things I find exciting. While the Viewmaster works in a Spacial or Cross-converged way, there's also complementary colour Anaglyphs (which you use those retro-looking red/blue glasses for) and Autostereograms (magic-eye type illusions), Lenticular printing and Holography.

While it is possible to create 3D stereoscopic images, we still seem to rely on a viewer to see the illusion. You can create your own 3D film (though this still requires 3D glasses), or you can spend ages squinting your eyes at pictures of cats on YouTube, like I did.
I'm just beginning to understand this and get my head around it, but definitely something to go on and explore within my work.


Want to see a guy inside a giant viewmaster? YES PLEASE.


Xavier Chassaing 'Scintillation'

Xavier Chassaing creates a film from over 35,000 photographs and a combination of live projection mapping techniques.
The use of single frames to describe movement is almost seemless here, and what I first notice is the extremely short depth of field which moves along a single close-up object, changing the focal point in a very photographic way.

SCINTILLATION from Xavier Chassaing on Vimeo.


How is it done?

“Scintillation” is an extraordinary and beautiful example of what can happen when an artist stows away in his apartment for eight months with nothing but his computer, a digital video projector, a DSLR and his imagination. French director Xavier Chassaing mounted his still camera on a homemade motion control rig capturing images as it moved 1mm per second. With multiple passes at varying exposures, the final piece uses 35,000 digital images. Chassaing then rendered 3D particle systems onto 3D models of the real life objects that would later act as a canvas for the projected visuals. Chassaing adds, “The shooting is 30 times slower than reality, resulting in having to gather as much material as for a feature film.”
from Stash Magazine online

Röyksopp 'The Girl And The Robot'

A few frames from the opening scene of The Girl and the Robot music video, I just love the lighting so much here!