Sensitive Painting is an interactive installation where a projector linked to a computer, casts images on a large size picture. The picture has been realized as a patchwork with 8 layers. Each layer has been realized composing infinite fragments of colored, transparent papers, stuck together with water based glue. Each layer portrays the eternal flux between Eros and Thanatos (love and destruction). The Libic Sybil, from Michelangelo Buonarroti on the Cappella Sistina, closes (and opens again) the open question summoned by the painting.
The images projected on the painting consist of the internal layers memorized in the computer. The underlying layers of the painting are scarcely visible on the painting itself. Some shots of the scenes were taken and then digitally captured during the artwork realization. Images coming from the creation progress symbolize a sort of genetic memory, composing themselves with the final painting to build the basic material of the artwork.
Before the projection, the images are modified in terms of saturation, hue, color inversion and other color contrast models in relation to the people interaction.
The perceptive results depends on the composition of the projected image, and the reflection on the physical matter of the real painting. In this way, the painting seems to change dynamically in color and shape.
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In front of the painting the visitors can interact on a sensitive surface. The surface has a woman body shape. The sensitive surface represents a sort of nervous system of the painting ranging from the eros to the thanatos zones mapped in the surface.
The visitor can interact moving their hands on the surface. When the hand of the visitor pass close a nerve of the painting, it reacts modifying the perceptive variables. Following the different trajectories on the surface, the visitor explores he whole aesthetic content of the painting. He can modify the color saturation (related to the eros zone), rotate the colors preserving the original relations, navigate in the painting history. In the thanatos zone, the visitor push the painting to destroy the colors towards the gray. This effect is obtained combining the original color of the painting with the complementary color projected by the computer. Still in the thanatos zone, the visitor causes a de-structuration or decomposition of the painting in several shape fragments that begin to move autonomously around the painting. In the eros zone, the visitor push the painting towards the recombination of the fragments to recompose the original shape.
Interaction Movies (1.3 Mb) 
The main theme of the installation is perception seen as an active principle, causing a change in reality based on observer's attitude, culture, action, social interaction. In this metaphor the painting, animated by its own nature, reacts to the observers, causing a continuous change in perceptive flux, dynamically underlining its aesthetic potential. The meeting between observer and the sensitive painting portrays the fusion between the artist's and observer's creative flux. The process of the artwork realization, embodied in the projected images is unceasingly elaborated by the observer's interactions, altering the receptive structures of the painting with their movements.
Aknowledgements
This work has been supported by Centro Multimediale of Terni. We would like to thank their hardware and software support for the realization of "Sensitive Painting".