Catherine McCurry

Phase Study is a series of videos and performances about a woman who attempts to separate herself in space. To occupy two places simultaneously. This was a semester long project culminating in a live performance in Williamsburg.

The woman takes measurements and writes in a notebook in dim light. She recites a brief text and sits in a chair in darkness. She breathes hard, blowing all of the air out of her lungs and takes a deep breath.

She practices and repeats this process again and again. Testing, perfecting. The whole performance consisted of 5 cycles.

I shot prepared video footage in the same room the performance took place in. I covered most of the walls with green material to be keyed out later.

The prepared videos were played back in Jitter and triggered wirelessly from the stage using a homemade bluetooth remote.

Jackson, Zach and I were tasked to reinterpret sculpture made from traditional materials, as a multichannel video installation. In our first conversation, we shared our tastes. I love giant installations – just anything that’s big. Jackson loves anything that’s scary, creepy, or twisted. And Zach is pretty much amenable. We chose to use Louise Bourgeois’ Maman, which I saw at the Tate Modern, as inspiration:

It’s 9 meters high and just awesome.

We wanted to create the environment or this spider/weaver/mother, rather than just creating a piece made from spiders. I fabricated a web made from white nylon stockings. and installed it in a corner in front of a layer of taut mesh. I also designed the sound.

Zach made an egg sack and a video of a human baby to be projected on it.

Jackson mapped the web, and animated a woman who crawled across it.

I’ve been thinking about this project since last spring, and made a failed attempt last semester in ICM. When the Kinect came out, I knew it was a solution, which is why I’m in this class.

I worked on a production that adapted Samuel Delaney’s novel, Dhalgren, for the stage. One of my favorite images from the book was not realized in the play and it’s stuck with me as a design problem that I know there’s a solution to (see my final proposal from ICM last semester for more background).

In the book, members of the Scorpion gangs wear projector necklaces when they roam the streets at night. With the touch of a button, the necklaces produce a holographic animal that surrounds their body and identifies them – dragons, mammoths, unrecognizable blobs when they’re not working correctly.

I had previously envisioned a solid, neon colored animal shape for these shields, and thought of using skeleton tracking with OpenNI to animate a 3D character. I was nervous about the animated character, though, and pretty sure it would look dumb.

A simple, and I think effective, solution occurred to me late in the game. I reimagined the design of the holograms – they could be skinned as the creatures rather than shaped like them. I modified an example from class to remove the background, then map pixel information from existing images to the depth image from the Kinect. I projected this onto two layers of mesh that I stood behind, producing a faux 3D projection effect. I tried a couple images – two dinosaurs and a lizard.

Here’s a diagram of my setup:

This is a study for an effect to be used in a live performance.

source (this is also the code for the RGB experiments in the post above)

I did 4 iterations of this scenario (here are two), playing around with the idea of documenting a study. I made measurements and tried to figure out different ways to leave evidence of this ability to split myself. Talking with Jason and Jackson last week, I came up with the idea of tying this to split to my ability to hold my breath. I blow out as much air as possible and slowly rotate my head until it becomes too difficult. My faster self interacts with matter, tries to become more physically present through exertion, addresses the video camera, and in this edit, manages to turn on the light so that it stays on.