Creative Coding

artistic concept

P.O.V. is a kinetic audiovisual interactive installation that changes accordingly to the user’s point of view.

The installation occupies a room equipped with a motion capture system, a sound system, a large projection in one of the walls and a cap with three rigid points that the user must wear to be able to interact with the piece.

In painting and graphical arts the point of view was traditionally given by the representation of an image in perspective. This was chosen by the artist who created this representation and offered it to the viewer as a static non-alterable image. In that respect, P.O.V. wants to free the viewer from this determinism and offers them the chance to view the work from any point of view of their choice.

Perspective is a mathematical system that evolved in antiquity and was introduced by Euclid in his Optics. Numerous artists and scientist have studied this phenomenon of vision since then in the search of a systematic theory that was fully developed in Florence in the Renaissance. Florentine artists as Ghiberti and Brunellschi relied heavily on Alhazen’s Book of Optics who pointed out that vision is not merely a phenomenon of pure sensation, but also involves judgment, imagination and memory; theory which conciliates the differences between the geometrical optics (Ptolematic and Euclidean) and physical optics (Aristotelian). This can be put in relation with later theories of perception as Gestalt and its key principles of emergence, reification, multistability and invariance, which I often explore in my work.

With the advent of 3D computer graphics we have mastered the art of perspective, but this is beyond the point of P.O.V. In this work I explore the behaviour of a two dimensional and lacking of perspective graphical image in a three dimensional space.

This is an image in constant motion, self-generated or induced by the viewer’s change of viewpoint. If we think about P.O.V. as a 2D image that creates the illusion of movement when the viewer looks at it, we could name the work of Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley as influences. The teachings of the constructivists and the Bauhaus has also had a big repercussion in my work.

We can control how to look at P.O.V., but P.O.V. also looks at us with an always-observing all-seeing eye. If we put in connection the representations of god as the eye of providence with our long time lost third eye or pineal eye, P.O.V. would be putting us under the scrutiny of our lost capability of feeling as a unitary sensatory experience.

P.O.V. also wants to explore the diffraction patterns created by the superimposed images that form the work. These are patterns of difference that have led to quantum philosophy-physicists to believe that we should understand the world from within as a part of it, as opposed to reflecting on the world from the outside as in representationalist systems (Karen Barad “Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning”). These diffraction patterns are explored in a visual and auditive way as P.O.V. generates sound which is altered and superimposed by the users point of view.

 

Technical Implementation

P.O.V. makes use of Processing, the Minim and Geomerative libraries, a Motion Capture System, a PA sound system and a projector.
Initially I created a graphic in Illustrator which I saved as a svg. Using Processing and the Geomerative package I animated my illustration, and I added sound with Minim.
Using a 3-point rigid body in a cap worn by the user, the motion capture system will communicate the head movements to the processing sketch which will be update the image shown by the projector and the sounds reproduced by the PA.

 

Evaluation of the Work

This has been a very challenging project due to mostly technical issues.
Ignorance, fear and frustration about how to use the motion capture system has led me to change the concept of my work up to three times.

I originally intended to create a screen mesh mirror image that the user would be able to deconstruct using a rigid body. After experimenting with this idea for a while I discarded, in between other reasons, for not finding it visually appealing enough.

Next, I thought about creating a mirror image that when pointed to with a rigid body by the user it’d crack like a broken mirror. Again, I discarded this idea after experimenting with packages like fisica and successfully creating a desktop application, but realising later on that it could not adapted to the motion capture system.

Finally I created P.O.V. which I am very pleased with. I’d like to polish some aspects of it as the way it generates sound, but overall I’m happy because I think it makes good use of the motion capture system and is strong visually and conceptually.

download the sketch