Under Scan April 22, 2009
Posted by admin in : Installation, Interactivity , add a comment
This is a beautifully realised public art piece that uses some state of the art projection technology.
UNDER SCAN is a large-scale public art project commissioned by the East Midlands Development Agency in England. Thousands of “video-portraits” taken in Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Northampton and Nottingham will be projected onto the ground of the main squares and pedestrian thoroughfares of these cities. At first, the portraits will not be visible because the space will be flooded by white light coming from the world’s most powerful projector. As people walk around the area, their shadow will be cast on the floor, revealing the video-portraits. The short video sequences begin with the subjects in a still position turned away from the camera. As they appear within pedestrians’ shadows, their bodies move and their heads turn to look straight at the pedestrian, potentially giving rise to an interesting range of interactions. When a shadow moves away from a portrait, the portrait likewise reacts by losing interest and looking away. With the assistance of a large team of developers, ArtReach production and Stage Right staging
3D Mapping April 22, 2009
Posted by admin in : 3D Mapping , add a commentA new area to look at that seems really exciting at the moment is 3D Mapping. I have included some examples below that offer some great possibilities for those of you interested in VJ’ing or anything related to performance video. this is an area we will be looking more at in the second year so it is worth doing a bit of research into what is possible now.
Anti VJ
Spatially Augmented Reality Tool Kit
Dataflux 0.1
http://www.vimeo.com/3282563
Video Projection Geante
Visual 3D Mapping in Modul8
This shows how it is done
Here is a nice commercial application with a new add for PUMA
On the Road April 22, 2009
Posted by admin in : Exhibitions , add a commentA few weeks ago whilst in Birmingham I visited the Barber Institute to see the exhibition of Jack Kerouac’s original scroll of On the Road. Kerouac was one of the original 1950’s Beat Generation and his novel On the Road has been a best seller for years. Written in one sitting, in a stream of consciousnesses style, on one long roll of paper. A great book well worth reading and a great record of 1950’s American culture. It became the blueprint for just about every road movie made.
Jack Kerouac: Back On the Road
“In April 1951, Kerouac sat down in front of a portable typewriter to begin writing, on sheets of tracing paper cut to size and taped together to form a scroll 120 feet long, the work that was to become the bible of the post-war Beat Generation.
The novel was completed after twenty days of continuous typing, fuelled, despite rumours to the contrary, by no other drug than caffeine. To a large extent autobiographical, and based on his own travels across America, On the Road tells the story of Sal Paradise and his friends and acquaintances — characters based on Kerouac himself as well as on Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others. It tells of their fascination with jazz, the landscape of America, women and sexuality, and is the archetypal ‘road-trip’ tale. One of the most valuable literary manuscripts in existence, the scroll was bought in 2001 by a private collector, but has been on public tour to museums and libraries across the United States since 2004. To coincide with the 50th anniversary of the novel’s first publication in Britain in 1958, the scroll will be on show at the Barber alongside maps, photographs, album covers and memorabilia that explore the novel’s genesis and its times.”
Part of the exhibition featured this text visualisation of On the Road by Stefanie Posavec. The image visualises sentences and structure of the novel visually and produces some beautiful imagery.
Click the image above for more info.
““Writing Without Words” was a collection of text visualizations completed for my final year in the MA Communication Design course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, England. The intention of this body of work was to explore various methods of visualizing literature without using words. I wanted to find a way of communicating the complexity of a story as well as create a system to highlight the similarities and differences in the writing styles of various authors. The structure of a novel, punctuation, parts of speech, and words per sentence were used to generate the final patterns.
Any piece of literature can be visualised using my techniques, but I chose to focus my project on the novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, because of its importance to me while growing up in Denver, Colorado – a key city within the novel. The designs are color-coded according to key themes and characters in the book, all of which were painstakingly marked out in a worn copy of the novel with highlighters and markers. The colors used in the final posters were chosen from automobile paint swatches of the 1940s.
“Writing Without Words” can be found online at: http://www.itsbeenreal.co.uk
Whilst researching Stafanie’s work I also came across http://www.wordle.net/ and in particular an article in the Guardian newspaper which published Barack Obama’s inauguration speech as a word cloud and compared it to similar speeches by George W Bush, John F Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln.
“Word clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” It is interesting to compare the most used words from each of the 4 speeches and the emphasis placed on certain key words.
Barack Obama’s inauguration Speech.
George W Bush’s inauguration Speech
John F Kennedy’s inauguration speech
Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration speech
