Mark

What is the effect of using silhouettes? Immersion.

Even in the immersive and submersive gallery space, Rock and her collaborators were faced with a design challenge. How to incorporate three-dimensional bodies of guests participants into the realm of the two-dimensional computer generated world.  The answer: silhouettes.

Consider all the silhouettes in the piece.  First, there are the cut-outs that Diana has read for us.  These are some of the creatures that inhabit the virtual sea. They are mermaids as well as the fish.  The file structure of the piece categorizes these as “puppets,” and they call to mind Balinese shadow puppets. They are mostly black but also include some white decoration.  In any event, they are, as all shadows, images in flattened form.

Then, there are the silhouettes of the mermaids swimming around or reclining on rocks.  These are both artworks and silhouettes of humans, dancing or swimming through the video, layered onto the layers of videos.

Finally, there are the shadows of those who interact with the piece.  As the light of the projections intersects with bodies of participants playing with the images, their shadows fall upon the walls and become incorporated into the sea of images with no more dimension than anything else in the piece. 

The fish jellies and mermaids all operate in two dimensions, and so do we in two of the Acts.

So shadows become a way of entering into the water and becoming one with it.  To go into the piece is to give up one of your dimensions and so too are you read into the piece through motion capture as a two-dimensional polygon, whose most important features are your edges, your outline. 

    final TrackedUser user1 = new TrackedUser("Tracker0", vrpnServer)
        {             public float handAngle;

            public void update(int deltaTime)
            {
                // Compute an angle for user 1 of the angle
                PVector hand = trackData[10];
                PVector finger = trackData[11];
                // calculate this angle
                float xD = finger.x - hand.x;
                float yD = finger.y - hand.y;
                float mag = sqrt(xD * xD + yD * yD);
                handAngle = 180.0/PI * acos( xD/mag );
  // other components are 0 since we're comparing with X axis - so cos theta is simple
            }
        };

To become part of this piece is to let your shadow play in the waters with the other shadows and two-dimensional renderings.