Interactive Film Project Film and Software Installation
Demonstration at ViSLAB
November 2006
The Interactive Film Project is an experiment that uses image detection and tracking software to isolate and follow an individual’s physical movements in real time. The live data feed of the people’s positions and coordinates are communicated to film clips of actors looking at specific angles.
These film clips are chosen and seamlessly brought together in real time using a video interfacing program. A non-linear narrative of interactive cinema thus results, allowing the viewers to have a direct impact on the reactions of the filmed actors via their physical movements in the space.
Loneliness can only afflict an entity whose being is essentially being with. In the same way, treating others as if they did not exist is an insult only if they have first been recognized as existing. (Being and Time, Heidegger 1953)
In the first version of The Interactive Film Project the artist herself is the central character who is watching the viewer. Instead of presenting a piece to be watched, the artist presents herself, and judges the viewers as they watch her and Sydney actor, Martin Walsh in a piece called The Outsider.
In The Outsider, both subjects maintain a manner that is confronting and positioned close to the screen. Their gaze is intentionally directed towards the viewers and aims to isolate the participants in their real space and in real time. This interaction and the reactions that occur between the film in the past and the current reality of the audience’s movements is posed as a challenge, both to the viewers and to the artist on the screen.
The Musicians is another application of the interface that involves viewers’ pro-active involvement with the installation to generate music. A bass player remains constant while a singer either dances, plays the kazoo or sings according to where the viewer is standing.
This interface is still under development. Instead of relying on an angle-based trigger, this interface will be determined by an invisible grid on the floor.
Certain squares on the floor will be assigned notes from the musical scale, thus the viewer can compose songs and direct the musicians in real time according to where they are standing in the room.
