LightPool 2006 - 2007
Water as one of the four elements of classical antiquity, has always held a central role in shaping our lives and the environment but the extent to which water remains a mystery is fascinating, considering its prevalence and importance to the planet. Yet despite its deceptively simple structure, this essential and ubiquitous substance exhibits strange characteristics that can constantly hold our attention.
General Description
Casting a pebble into a pond and the hypnotic fascination of watching ripples spread out across the surface of still water becomes the starting point for this meditative installation, where the participants become the pebbles and the disturbances ripples of light.
Installation Description
Participants are tracked by the installation and their movements become translated into constantly moving ripples, propagating across the surface of a virtual water pool that is back-projected onto a shop front window.
A camera is positioned outside and above the shop window looking down into street area below. As people move within this area, their positions are tracked by the software in real-time and translated into moving light patterns.
Technical Description
Implementation is based on G-Vision software, developed by the artist and which is a vision-based gesture and motion recognition software toolset for real-time analysis within interactive installation and performance scenarios. (Historic note: this was a software solution developed from 2005-2007 prior to the release of 'Kinect' in June 2009).
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The G-Vision project developed flexible software that harnessed contemporary developments in computer vision for use by artists in a wide range of installation and performance scenarios. This was built as a series of add-on objects that integrates with the widely used Max/MSP/Jitter software environment, distributed and developed by Cycling’74 based in the USA.
Max/MSP/Jitter is a graphical programming environment for music, audio, multimedia and real-time video processing and has been in use worldwide for many years by performers, composers and installation artists. It provides a visual toolkit of powerful programming objects.
Since G-Vision is built upon the Max/MSP/Jitter programming environment, limitations inherent in fixed purpose applications are mitigated and G-Vision becomes a powerful, adaptable and scalable set of objects integral to the application.
The system is cross-platform (PC/Mac) and simply requires video input capability such as a DVcam, webcam, iSight or other compatible cameras. This LightPool installation was run on an Apple Mac mini.