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| Digi Contorni | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author(s): | Mauricio Melo |  |
| Instructor: | Rozin, Daniel | |
| Class: | The World-Pixel by Pixel | |
| URL: | http://www.mauriciomelo.com/contents/interact08.htm | |
| Documents: | (JPEG) | |
| Keywords: | Video, installation, Pixel by Pixel, mirror, posterized colors | |
| Video installation that mixes static and dynamic shapes taken from a live video camera. Traces of the viewer’s movements remain frozen and fade out as they are drawn in flat colors generating an always-changing visual composition. | ||
| The main idea was to start out from the visual artistic style associated with artistic printmaking and blend it with the interactive capabilities of computer processing. The result bears some traces of the typical visual style of silk-screen printing, with dynamic live video. Some combined characteristics of both styles are: on the traditional printmaking side, a pallet of few flat colors and repetitive graphic elements, and on the other side, a live video feed generated by the viewer, and processed in real time by the computer. There is also room for unpredictability in terms of shapes and patterns to the output, which translates into an always-changing visual composition. | ||
| Background: | This video installation is the result of a work that was initially inspired by the work of Stanley William Hayter a British graphic artist that spent much of his efforts in reviving the print as an independent art form. His prints are varied in technique and style, but most characteristically are influenced by the abstract vein of surrealism and are notable for their experiments with textures and color. What is interesting about Hayter’s style, in many of his prints, is the fact that they seem to blend static shapes with patterns that suggest movement. There is always an insinuated figure that lives within a counterpoint of lines and shapes that seem to spin off the main subject. The other notable characteristic of his work is the treatment of color. Many of his prints rely on few and plain colors typical of art print work. This installation tries to pick up on these particular treatment of colors, lines, and shapes. It works posterizing (two or three colors) and coloring moving images in such a way that the edges remain static as they are captured resulting in a mix of static and dynamic lines and shapes that resemble the output of traditional art print work but as a result of the users input. | |
| Audience: | Anyone at a public space installation | |
| User Scenario: | The user stands or walks in front of the screen and camera. Traces of his movement remain frozen as they are drawn. | |
| Technical System Description: | Any type of screen A video camera A computer to run a C++ executable | |
| Conclusions: | I didn’t make any breaking statement with this project. But I discovered that there are unlimited possibilities for visual expression when introducing new technologies to visual languages and styles, and in this, the Pixel by Pixel class was an eye-opener. At the same time I learned that the more limited I felt on the technological aspect, the harder I had to rely on the aesthetic side. What really pleases me about the final result is that it’s difficult to tell where one ends and where the other begins… which at the end doesn’t really matter. | |