With interactive artworks, the viewer's actions and behavior can influence the state of the artwork at any particular moment. The line between the artwork and the viewer becomes ambiguous and the viewer becomes a part of the artwork itself. The artwork becomes alive by incorporating the viewers. Paintings prior to the digital era stood independently of the viewers, with a clearly defined boundary between the viewers and the objects being viewed. Painting remains the same whether someone has seen it five minutes before, or if someone experiences it simultaneously next to another viewer. How does each viewer feel after seeing a painting? What do they think? These are important questions. An artwork comes to life based on its relationship with an individual. However, the incorporation of the viewer causes the viewer and the artwork to become more like a single entity, changing the relationship between the artwork and an individual into the relationship between the artwork and a group of people. Then the important questions become: Was there another viewer there five minutes ago? How is the person next to you behaving? At the very least, even when you are looking at the painting, you will start to wonder about the person standing next to you. Change in the relationship between artworks and groups, has the potential to influence the relationships among the viewers of the artwork.
Projection
Guide to Projectors for Interactive Installations
Video projectors are one of the most important tools for creators of interactive installations. The information for projectors is available on various websites, but this 2 part guide will focus on their use in production and interactive environments. Part 1 will focus on the projector as hardware(lenses, lumens, surfaces etc), and part 2 will go into more details on the software and calibration considerations. This will gather some of that disparate knowledge into the important bits you need to make informed decisions about creating a high quality experience.
TouchDesigner
TouchDesigner is a visual development platform that equips you with the tools you need to create stunning realtime projects and rich user experiences. Whether you're creating interactive media systems, architectural projections, live music visuals, or simply rapid-prototyping your latest creative impulse, TouchDesigner is the platform that can do it all.
Krzysztof Wodiczko
Krzysztof Wodiczko was born in 1943 in Warsaw, Poland, and lives and works in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1980, he has created more than seventy large-scale slide and video projections of politically charged images on architectural façades and monuments worldwide. By appropriating public buildings and monuments as backdrops for projections, Wodiczko focuses attention on ways in which architecture and monuments reflect collective memory and history. In 1996, he added sound and motion to the projections, and began to collaborate with communities around chosen projection sites—giving voice to the concerns of heretofore marginalized and silent citizens who live in the monuments’ shadows. Projecting images of community members’ hands, faces, or entire bodies onto architectural façades, and combining those images with voiced testimonies, Wodiczko disrupts our traditional understanding of the functions of public space and architecture. He challenges the silent, stark monumentality of buildings, activating them in an examination of notions of human rights, democracy, and truths about the violence, alienation, and inhumanity that underlie countless aspects of social interaction in present-day society....
The Icebook
The Icebook is the world's first projection mapped pop-up book, a theatrical installation depicting a silent fable through a combination of paper pop-ups, projection mapping and music. By day, each of the 11 pages is no more than a few feet tall featuring intricately hand-cut blank pop-ups, but when the lights go out and a projection is beamed onto the book's pages, the paper comes to life as if by magic and a dark, atmospheric story unfolds about a man on a journey through the wilderness. The result is an intimate, 15 min visual experience that's greater than the sum of its parts, designed for an audience of no more than 12 people.
Lit Tree
<p>A small potted tree is augmented with video projection, creating volumetric light patterns using itʼs own leaves as voxels. This technique allows a tree to have a visceral conversation with human visitors, and to become a new type of aesthetic object.</p> <p>The tree that can display digital media’ is a provocation against a current asymptote of outdoor digital media that champions media facades, we instead suggest interventions in reaction to existing unscripted entities within the environment such as trees.</p> <p>The projection triggers photosynthesis effects which affect tree growth, suggesting the possibility of 3D printing a tree, and of visitors feeding the tree through interaction with it.</p> <p>Lit Tree uses structured light projection techniques developed by Kimchi and Chips which they have made available online for free.</p>