SPACE
OF TWO CATEGORIES
interactive installation by Hanna Haaslahti
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ARTIST STATEMENT
Human body is a transforming entity, which gathers and stores our life inside an aging and changing form better than any computational device. The childhood represent a previous state of adult body and many things in the rest of our lives are shaped by the way we experience things during that time. The installation evokes our childhood as a phenomenological state of being. Your body will allways remember it, allthough your rational mind has put those memories aside.
The installation is not about wonders of technology, but wonders
of human body, which are revealed within technological environment.
It
is also
about the revaluation of body and it´s sensing capabilities,
which points to the necessity to change our understanding of the role
of the
body in
the process of perception and meaning making. Phenomenological body
gathers information with all senses, which means that somehow all thought
is
embodied.
Implementing digital connecitivity in an analogue environment without
a design for all the senses , without a concept of corporal literacy,
leads
to information overload. In a ubiquitous computing environment
the user has to be not only textually and visually literate,
both also
have corporal
literacy, that is an awareness of extelligence and a working knowledge
of all the senses, says Rob van Kranenbourg (Virtueel Platform).
In a future world of supersenses, Martin Rantzer of Ericsson Foresight
claims: "New communication senses will be needed in the future
to enable people to absorb the enormous mass of information with which
they
are confronted," According to him the user interfaces we use today
to transmit information to our brains threaten create a real bottleneck
for new broadband services. Instead of taking a resource-centred approach,
attaching data to objects, let's mine our history of biological senses
for clues on how to take a human, experimential approach.
TECHICAL
EXPLANATION OF THE INSTALLATION
The technical structure of the installation is based on classical computer-vision set-up, where a camera and software monitors constantly restricted area of interest. The camera and projector are positioned behind a rear-projection screen, so that the technology of the installation is completely invisible for the audience. The software is tracking and analyzing the video flow of people´s shadows reflected on the rear-projection screen and then reprojecting the shadows back in real-time with imagery of a little girl added in them. An IR-pass filter (blocks all visible light) is attached to the camera lens. This makes the video projection on people´s shadows invisible for the camera and ensures that the shape recognition is made correctly.
The shape recognition software is written in MAX/MSP/Jitter with specially
developed computer vision objects. The software has been developed since
the beginning of 2006 by programmer Seppo Heikkilä.
The software tracks the center point of shadows and keeps the video imagery
running allways from there, following shadow´s movements on the screen.
If more than one people is present, all shadows create a space together for
little girl to run around. By moving around you can play and share her projection
with other people present in the installation.
Programming : Seppo Heikkilä
Production support : Arts Council of Finland, AVEK - Audiovisual Promotion Center of Finland
Produced by Fantomatico © 2007
