Project Proposal
Description:This installation will be a video projection of 1 character onto a specially treated projection surface.
This work continues the performance-based research I have been doing where the subject in front of the camera, played by myself, interacts with a single prop and develops a gestural vocabulary that animates a relationship between the subject, prop and the camera. Another characteristic of this work is that there is a blurring of foreground and background that destabilizes what is being represented. The guiding interest in these studies is to explore the relationship between embodiment, subjectivity, borders and barriers.
In this instance the ‘prop’ in question is the blackness of the filter and mask that will be created in jitter. As an initial experiment I have tested the patch created by JS. As the character in this work moves, the screen lightens akin to the sense that there is smoke dissipating. However, the character’s gesture is to blacken herself with charcoal and so in the same instant the character is lightening and darkening at the same time. Or in other words, one quality of blackness is replaced by another.
Problematic:This study moves away from a simplistic comparison between ‘real’/ analogue blackness and a ‘digitized’ blackness, attempting instead to thicken the space between these types of blackness and connect them to one another, or at least highlight the indeterminacy of the spaces in between.
This will be explored at one register by using different types of filters and masks, eg a blurring filter (ie spatial) and a delay (aka temporal); and having them triggered by different kinds of gestures (eg large vs small; fast vs slow). These different indices will vary the kind of blackness that is produced by the patch. Specific gestures and movement of the performer/subject will trigger these different qualities, as different kinds of movement will combine blurring and delay in different proportions.
At another register, the performing subject will use the charcoal fairly architecturally, marking the space around her and experimenting with the focal length of the camera in blackening the space three dimensionally.
Consequently this space of indeterminacy or its thickness is activated by the performance and the quality of the gestures that are developed to respond to this system. In other words the subject in the work and her gestural vocabulary completes the system.
Installation
This work is not installed as an interactive work. However, its projection will be done on a particular surface that heightens the textural qualities of blackness I am exploring. This is something I will have to experiment with but might include issues of scale (smaller?), angle (looking down?), shape of projection surface, and most importantly texture of surface (perhaps covered with charcoal? Or translucent).
I am especially thinking of two works by Studio Azzuro, although the tone of their work is more baroque and what I want to do is very sparse, but I want to follow their methodology. http://www.studioazzurro.com/works/cat_vint.htm#
Le zattere dei sentimenti --- the raft of feelings (2002) has a broken table that the shipwrecked bodies are swimming on. Something of the instability of their rescue is amplified by the surface and the relation the viewer has looking down on the table.
In the second – Dove va tutta 'sta gente --- where are all these people going (2000)
the material and shape of the projection surface has a strong relationship to the affect of the inaccessibility of the bodies who appear lost. I think this has to do with the scale and the relation that the projection spaces have to the room.
Technical:
This study will use slide, delay, and frame difference as filters and masks.
Below are the tools which seem to encompass the sort of changes I am looking for.jit.op.frame difference
jit.slide
jit.op.blur
jit.lumakey
jit.matrixset-delay