Stanze

Annunziato, Gemma de Julio, Pierucci, '97. Interactive Installation

This installation is composed by a video-camera and a back-projected screen located in a void room. The camera is located at the top center of the screen. The observer has freedom to move around the room and several observers can interact with the artwork. The images coming from the video-camera are sent to a computer and elaborated by a program which is able to analyze the scene, to detect the movements and to codify they in terms of action on the image and to play sounds connected with the movements of the observer.

On the screen we superimpose predefined images with that ones of the observers extracted by the image coming from the camera. The predefined images represent a path between a sequence of rooms in a farm house where we reproduce painted scenes (and elaborated by digital way) with the authors and their symbols.

Interaction

The real images of the observer, detected by the camera are separated by the background and elaborated in real time in term of the colors. Finally they are inserted in the virtual environments (the imaginary internal rooms) and projected on the screen. The gestures achieved by the observers cause the progressive disappearance of a room and the passage to the subsequent room.

The sounds associated to the images and to the observer movements are synthesized in real time. The sound timbres (instruments) change in relation to the room and to the zone of the image excited by the movement of the observer. The note and duration are completely controlled by the observer movements which, through the interaction, realizes the composing and executing experience of a musical sequence. The artwork manifest itself to the observer movement and it reproduces always new aspects as the result of the creativity of the achieved gestures. In this sense the artwork realize the fusion between the artist creativity and the observer one and it takes energy from this meeting.

audio-video movie (7.3 Mb)

The physical, natural gesture is one the most important expressive and immediate channels to exchange information, emotions, images, rhythms and music of silences. In this sense the body of the observer and its movements are completely embodied in the artwork and it constitute the main elements. The exposition of the installation to the public, has constituted a fundamental experience for us in order to understand the importance of a deep interaction with the public and focalize the effect of the observer embodiment. Often some observers identify itself in the scene choosing a position in the room to be proportioned to the scene and painted personages. The less inhibited observers, after a first phase of study start a dance of iterated movements. This allow they to pass from an episodic and not structured melody to a constant rhythm with tonal and instrumental variation which depend by light alterations on the iterated movements.

The natural gesture is transferred in a musical and visual effect, but this effects strongly influence the movement. So, the feedback is transferred in the perception of the interacting actor who tends to losses the consciousness to drive the installation itself (after a while it is hard to him to understand if he drives or follows the sound/images generation).

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The Body Music (audio-visual movie, very interesting, 8.5 Mb)

Finally the images which compose the virtual scenes are realized through the fusion of two different artistic styles (acrylic paintings and digital compositions). The painting is the basic matter for the digital interventions. The experimentation of this synthesis and the fusion in the video and sound media is one of the basic themes of this installation. The driving idea is to think to the multimediality not as - the contemporary presence of different media - but as - a strict connection between the dynamics of different media - up to establish causality link between action achieved on a media and reaction induced on the other media.

Stanze: the Virtual Paths

In parallel to the realization of the installation we have produced a wide material of documentation and intermediate works. We have assembled this material (emails, text, images, scripts, schemes, ideas) in a virtual path recorded in a CD-Rom, that corresponds to the history of the development of the "Stanze" installation. In this paths, aspects of the artists personal life, emotions, visions and deviations constitute a number of fragments collected in several rooms following the original intent of the artwork.

In this synthesis for the web the images, musics and video are at low resolution for transmission problems.

Genesi

This collection of italian text is a more complete time-sequential material of the documentation utilized as base for the virtual path.