Projections R Us

 

Tonight was "dig+it+art," otherwise known as the Capstone Showing for the Arts Technology Certificate Program at the University of Utah. As I have been participating in this program all year for my sabbatical, I got to show a piece as well. My piece was entitled "Dots and Lines and Dance and All of Us."

To create it, I recruited a group of dancers (mostly freshman modern dance students at the University of Utah but also my wife, Jacque, who is a professional modern dance choreographer) and had each of them improvise a 10-second sequence that I filmed with a Kinect hooked up to my MacBook and running through Processing. From there, I took the RGB video at 1 FPS and ran it through a nice, blurry B&W filter, placed the 100 resulting images on a grid in random order, and made it possible to connect the images from a dance with a Catmull-Rom spline. (Of course....) I also created videos of the point clouds and skeletons, also at 1 FPS. Each of the three parts – clouds, grid, and skeletons – was projected on a large wall. Lots of fun!

New media and video game activism at the New Frontier exhibit

[Above: Stills from two critical video games by Molleindustria: "Oiligarchy" and "The McDonald's game."]

Woo hoo! The Sundance Film Festival is getting frisky! They've included non-film art — new media video work and video game art, to be particular — in this year's festival and, Holy Moses, there's some amazing things going on. The exhibit, entitled New Frontier, is on display at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art through May 19.

Excellent large scale data visualizations about wildlife encroachment, a participatory Kinect piece about a disaster at a Los Angeles food bank, a 3-D celebration (sort of) of aggression in Hollywood, people raging at their computers, and video games that you always lose no matter what. It's all from what you might call "the art of discomfort" but it's amazing.

I'm so glad to see this in Salt Lake City!