Güvenç Özel is an architect, researcher and artist, who has been preoccupied with creating responsive environments, some with emotive control. His Morphogram work proposal for a quadrocopter actuated surface/roof responding to human form, movement, sound and emotions (EEG). It is a responsive environment bordering on being a wearable.
Although the visual feedback of the surface is there, I wonder if this would come into play when considering the activation of the body schema.
Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor is a installation consisting of two montitors at the end of a corridor each featuring a video feed. The upper video feed captures the user from behind and diminishes as he or she walks towards the monitors, the bottom monitors show pre-taped footage of the same corridor, only empty.
The installation is eerie in several ways: In attempt to see herself on the top monitor, the user only ever sees herself from behind walking away from the camera eye. Oppositional movement as walking towards becomes walking away. And attempting to see the image motive clearer, makes it shrink. The bottom monitor which appear as an image, has edited out the user altogether.
In Brigitta Zics’ Mirror_SPACE installation the users’ face is scanned in real time by infrared sensor device, and calculate mood values. This data is transformed into a virtual mirror image presented on screen. Zics also argues that “Mirror_SPACE is a system of reflections of a type which involves not only optical appearances but also forces which act on us andwhich we cannot control affecting our phenomenal image” (Zics 2005)
I find it interesting how the user is confronted with a real-time virtual interpretation of himself/herself. And also that the virtual object avatar is semi-autonomous of the user, meaning it will partly be controlled by the users movements as well as the proximity to other virtual objects.
Daniel Rozin artworks are centered around the mirror image.
In Penguin Mirror (2015) 450 stuffed penguins on rotating motors are situated on the gallery floor, offering a binary mirror image of any spectator in front of the penguin colony. Beyond being a feat of mechanical control and translation of Kinect data, I am wondering if this work stimulates reflection around one owns body image, beyond the aspect of play.
A similar work is the IRIS installation by the new media collective HYBE, where the ambient light from the spectator is translated into a matrix of 400 monochrome LEDs making the mirror image. Each LED consists of a liquid crystal fluid, which change color from white to black (circles opening and closing) dependent on the amount of light.
