Spectacle of Change
Spectacle of Change is a portrait study created at the ScreenLab 0x01 residency in MediaCityUK, hosted by the University of Salford
and organized by Kit Turner and Elliot Woods.
Along with fellow resident Memo Atken, we spent five
days experimenting with the displays in Egg space at the UoS MediaCityUK campus.
The space contains an array of high resolution Christie MicroTiles on which we were invited to explore the idea "the future of broadcast".
During the residency I became interested in a community of artists at the Islington Mill where I was staying. The artists
had varied backgrounds and disciplines, but in all our conversations spoke about how digital and networked
culture was influencing their practice and visual aesthetics.
I spent a day at the Mill interviewing artists and taking their portraits with the Kinect+SLR scanner. With custom software built
in openFrameworks and drawing from the RGBDToolkit system, the artists' images are rendered live
across all the displays while their words playback in the space.
The three column displays provide unique perspectives on the portraits. The virtual camera
angles are continually shifting to provide different view on the same moment in time. Realtime
software playback on MicroTiles is a perfect format for this wireframe visual aesthetic, as the lines appear
crisp and bright even when just inches from the screen.
The large central display provides an abstracted view of the artist standing in their studio,
and using a Kinect sensor and head tracking, corrects the perspective in real time to create the
illusion of viewing the space through a window. (thanks to Elliot Woods for the clever head
tracking system!)
The RGBDToolkit is created with support from the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry and Eyebeam NYC.
Media
