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Bump: Pressure Project #2: Dancing Depths

Posted: January 23, 2024 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized |Leave a comment »
Pressure Project #2: Dancing Depths
Bumping Axel’s post here. I find this work to be very interesting from a technological and aesthetic perspective. I’d like to learn how to capture the body shape and movement of someone or group of people through camera or sensing apparatus, and then in near-realtime make a fitted projection map to their body as it moves through an ‘observo-projectable’ region of space. He entitled the piece ‘microbial skin’ which I thought was fitting for the look of his fluorescent and textural projections. The contrast between the projection and the darkness was also a cool effect – there seemed to be no spillover onto the backwall – meaning that the sensors modeled the human form accurately.

I find this project to be technically stimulating and conveys an interesting message about humans. Familiar in anatomy, but there is almost a chameleon like skin tapering around giving an alien / post-human effect. It seems that Axel used a kinect device which I know uses infrared technology to track movement. In this way, the computer vision filters out the projected light spectrum which is interesting. As opposed to the way we see the these ethereal neon figures, the computer just sees boundaries. Meaning the camera’s are unaffected by these artificial skins or personas mapped onto humans. It makes sense that this IR tech was chosen because I imagine it to be more accurate in low light conditions and less computationally expensive than visible light computer vision algorithms.

However, I still think it interesting to experiment with this project using a camera or a mix of IR and visible light processing. This allows for the interactive system to experience humans in both their anatomy and artificial skin. From a psychological level, this tradeoff in accuracy speaks to confusion between what we are and what we want to be. I think a bit of messiness in the tracking human motion and projecting onto account for the unclean boundaries between the two. The camera will have to contend with analyzing both the accentuated projected light and its faint shadow of physical form.

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