Change of plans

So I've decided to change my plans around for this project. It still involves mirrors but I have some new ideas of how to work with them. I've come up with two possibilities for this main idea; the first one involves using a webcam (maybe two) to capture the viewer, which gets sent through isadora and to the mini projector which projects itself onto a piece of board with shattered bits of mirror deliberately arranged on it to finally reflect and project into an empty wooden frame on the wall. And to make the piece interactive I would use one of the wireless controllers to control filters in isadora.

The other idea, which is turning out to be the more appealing one to me, is to use the same set up, but instead of relying on webcam feeds for content I would kill two birds with one stone and incorporate my final video piece for Jesse's class, having the 3-4 minute piece projected onto the broken mirror to create an even more abstracted presentation of an already abstract video piece. My main influence for the video piece is Takeshi Murata who works with data moshing and heavy manipulation of old school found footage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1f3St51S9I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVF4Vzy1H_c

I'm thinking about using footage from the movie "The fly" to capture some really bizzare/creepy horror footage and to make it even creepier and weirder. I also plan on making my own audio for the piece using heavily manipulated clips from the footage and my own sort of ambient background music. Here are some quick and dirty sketches of the set up:

some inspiration

After thinking about my webcam-mirror project I was reminded of this guys' work, kind of a similar idea to mine but much more technically involved. Really cool stuff.

http://www.smoothware.com/danny/woodenmirror.html

-A "wooden mirror" made of wood blocks on motors which reflect different amounts of light to simulate shading and pixels.

http://www.smoothware.com/danny/brokenmirror.html

-Not necessarily interactive but still a very cool site specific piece.

Project ideas

So I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do for this last project, the only problem is that I need to do some testing with this idea to make sure my theories work in practice. I'm really interesting in the idea of what happens to a projected image once it hits a mirror. My assumption is that if you square up one of those mini projectors to a mirror the image will simply reflect on to whatever is in front of the mirror. So I've come up with this idea of a distorted self image; a fake reflection. I want to have a simple square mirror on a wall with a little webcam at the very top of the mirror, the webcam would feed into a computer and run through Isadora, and then run through a mini projector directly over the viewers head perfectly squared up with the mirror. I want to also use a bend sensor or some kind of interactive device to manipulate some filter within Isadora in real time. The idea in the end is that your face (picked up by the webcam) would be projected back onto the mirror, and then theoretically that image of your face would end up on your actual face as a reflection. This is probably easier to explain with a diagram:


And if it turns out that projecting an image of your face on your face doesn't exactly turn out I have a backup plan to create some interesting 3d animations and to use a couple of projectors projecting these animations onto some interesting geometry to give the appearance of interaction between animation and object.

First post

In class we talked about sharing links and other resources for inspiration so I thought I'd share one or two cool sites I stumbled on this weekend.

http://fiveprime.org/hivemind/User/ben%20matthews%20:::/Interesting

- this is a good collection of really good photography by Ben Matthews. I like his experimentation with long shutter speeds and drawing with light.

http://enyocreative.com/work/illustration

- Some works by Josh Kenyon. Really colorful and creative designs