Absent Landscapes : Invisible Journeys

ICDC 2005 / PVA Residency 2005 / Split New Media Festival 2006
Absent Landscapes : Invisible Journeys

+ Technology + User Interaction + User Experience + Theme

A series of Live Responsive Video Artworks, where the user navigates a journey through an undetermined narrative terrain. The aim of these works was to explores the user's capacity to relate to the 'geographical' narrative discourse with the landscape that they come to inhabit through the 'virtual vista' of the Responsive Video Screen. Multiple video cameras tracked the user's movement using a system that was developed with MAX/MSP/Jitter software.

During a PVA Media Lab UK Production Residency in April/May 2004, Absent Landscapes : Invisible Journeys was further developed with the addition of a prototype interactive surround sound 'soundscape' using MAX/MSP/Jitter and Motu 5.1. Sonic spacialization was also investigated during Summer Workshops at Goldsmith's Music Technology Studios and was completed and exhibited at the 9th Split New Media festival in Croatia.

Technology : Video tracking forms the basis of the technical interface and around which the system architecture has been developed, measuring both single and multiple users physical shape and scale, position within an environment in relation to the video screen(s), plus their direction of movement. Video input, data-analysis, plus live video and audio processing is controlled by a Jitter - Max/MSP custom made interactive system.

User Interaction : The invisible interface of video tracking will allows for the generation of visual content dependent on the physical shape/scale of the users(s), measured direction of their movement and proximity of the user or users to the screen. Through the use of measuring the users interaction there will be no temporal curve involved, they will create live montage of fractured landscapes that track the user(s) within the screen(s), the visual interplay will be unique, depending on the scale, direction and proximity to create a visual journey of newly generated landscapes and timescapes. The emergence of the a unique visual geography will be through the systems responding to its measurements of how the user engages with the work. Within visual geographies ‘sight’ is more ‘temporal’ than the other senses. While interacting with the video screen(s) the user may become aware of the movement of vistas and objects and the time passing. Some details pass them by, while others proceed much more slowly. Visual experience appears to go past them, although are able to catch glimpses of this or that scene, with the ability to linger on some events, putting together a (montage) collection of temporally organised images. Vision is time-specific, in the sense of when an object is illuminated in a particular way at a certain moment, and temporal in the sense that visual images persist over time and give continuity to a geographical experience The physical and temporality of the experience of the proposed art work is amplified through the use of the visual media of video. The sense of vision provides both a geographical and temporal continuity and partial unity of our experience of the environment.

+ Technology + User Experience + Theme + Top

User Experience of Live Exhibition: Aim of the work is to shattered chronological time by the user’s interaction with the landscape. The user(s) journey through a undetermined generated narrative terrain; due to the physicality of the visual and aural experience the user would find it difficult relate to a single point in time because it is predicated upon a continuity that shifts due to their presence within the space. Thus the present sphere of experience is turned into a transitional space in which the user may inhabit, screen time become fluid; as live responsive experience does not parcel itself into linear, closed structures, the work attempts to create a ‘poetic’ synthesis of image, experience and meaning emerging through a meditative reflection of which the user is absorbed.

+ Technology + User Interaction + Top

Theme : The Word landscape itself is derived from the Dutch landschap ,which in turn derives from Middle Dutch landscap, closely related are danish Landskab, German landschaft, and Old English landscipe, with suffixes means " to shape" and also (as in the English -ship) " association" and " partnership". The word 'Landscape's etymology suggests a rich tapestry of meaning linking place to people, and land to living. Landscape is the world a know to those who have dwelt there, who will dwell there, and those who practical activities take them through its manifold sites and who journey along its multitudinous paths. Any such landscape is a place of memory and temporality. The landscape is constituted as an enduring record of - and testament to - the lives and works of the past generations what have dwelt within it, and in doing so have left there something of themselves. Memories are often organised around particular spaces such as buildings or bits of landscape. It is these different spaces that structure people's capacity to reminisce, to day-dream about what might have been or to recollect about how their own lives have intersected with many others.The landscape in short, is not a totality that we or anyone else can look at, it is the world in which we stand in taking up a point of view on our surroundings....For the landscape, to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty, is not so much the objects as ' the homeland of our thoughts'. Through the visual and ideological motif of landscape, this interactive work would examines our understanding of landscape, (both physical and virtual), hidden under layers of distorted/discarded personal, social and the geographical history that has been eradicated and forgotten over the course of time. This work would explores the users capacity to relate to the 'geographical' discourse, both physical and historical, of the landscape that they now inhabit through a 'virtual vista' of a interactive video installation. Thus this new piece of interactive art, through the use of the 'landscape' motif would generate a physical, temporal and sociological interplay that allows for a multitude of meaning of which the user or users emmerse themselves.

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