March 10, 2006
Shadow Bag
Symbiotic Systems
Normally there's an individual perception of our own shadow? What's the relationship between the body and its projection in space? This is the area of interest Shadow Bag deals with. It's an installation, by Scott Snibbe, that through a complex system of video projections involves the body of the spectator with a reactive attitude. Everytime a visitor walks in the area illuminated by the projector, his shadow is captured and re-projected on a screen, triggering an unpredictable series of interactions and behaviors. Sometimes there's no feedback, sometimes the shadows are wandering from side to side, sometimes they behave like mirrors. When the spectator's movements cross one of the projections, it suddenly collapses or simply dissolves.
The work's title is inspired by the Junghian theory of the body's shadow: it is compared to a bag that contains all the human animal instincts and goes further wondering about the social fallout of this hypothesis. Through the project's interactive principle, Snibbe digs up the complexity of the individual behaviors in front of our own (or another) projected alter-ego. But he also promotes the interdependence feeling and the friendly interaction amongst foreigners, improving also the visitors' focus on the self. The sense of the work is constructed by the participants through a body awareness process and all its expressions. Quoting the words of the philosopher Merleau Ponty, the body is the privileged access to the world: "The body in the world has a similar role of the heart in the organism: it continuously keeps the visible spectacle alive, it animates it and it feeds it from within, establishing a symbiotic system with it." by Francesca Tomassini, NEURAL. Another work by Scott Snibbe...
Via Computing for Emergent Architecture: You Are Here 2004 (led by Eric Siegel) is an interesting application that tracks and displays the paths of visitors traveling through a large public space.
The system displays the aggregate paths of the last two hundred visitors along with blobs representing the people currently being tracked. When viewers approach the work, they can display the live video image with the paths of currently tracked visitors superimposed.
(…)
The technology of this system is rooted in surveillance systems that are rapidly being put into place in all of our public spaces: airports, shopping malls, grocery stores and our streets and parks. The motivation for such public systems ranges from security and law enforcement to marketing and advertising. The system of this artwork is wholly anonymous – no data is collected and the only use of the information is by the museum visitors to track themselves and their friends. However, in many real-world applications of such technology, the identities of those being tracked are also registered. You Are Here provides a visceral understanding of surveillance systems’ capabilities and a sensual, visual representation of information that is normally only accessible as dry statistics.
This benevolent application of tracking is also meant to show the interconnectedness of viewers’ with other visitors to the space by give them a sense of the aggregate presence of people over time. [blogged by nicolas on pasta and vinegar]
Posted by jo at March 10, 2006 10:03 AM
