Entering the room, an optical illusion challenges you: how many windows do you see?
In an exchange with its virtual self, one window multiplies to two. The line drawing on the wall is an illusion, made to appear as a partner to the real window when seen from the entry door. Its virtual makeup—lines drawn on the wall—mirrors the original window with corresponding lines.
To create the illusion, centuries-old techniques of perspective and anamorphic projection drawing merge with new computational methods. After measuring the room, digital models assist in aligning the illusion with the unique vantage point: the only door into the room. With the geometry established, key points mapped on the wall guide the hand-painted completion of the illusion. From the door, the illusion—a trompe l'oeil—renders the view of the false window as in line with the existing room. Once you walk into and around the room, the illusion breaks down, revealing the window illustration as a trick of geometry.
Site-specific installation, The Mattress Factory Art Museum, Pittsburgh
High Rise is a city made of animated GIFs.
Growing up in New York City, I have always been in awe of the skyscraper. We are in a new boom era for the super-tall buildings, especially in regions new to city-making. High Rise is an endless digital city made from actual photographs I have acquired traveling cities on four continents.
High Rise is an endless city; it never stops trying to get taller and taller.
A custom optical illusion to add to your selfie stick.
To reduce vainglory and self-importance, victorious Generals in Ancient Rome would receive Memento Mori: a constant reminder of the fleeting nature of celebrity and acclaim, and that "Thou art mortal."
Derided as "solipsistick" and the epitome of narcissism, perhaps the Selfie Stick needs an accessory to rein in runaway vainglory. Or maybe just a way to add emoji to your selfies.
Using principles of anamorphosis—obliquely distorted perspective—the printed graphics are applied to the selfie stick. The smartphone camera is the only vantage point capable of decoding the image, inserting a graphic into your selfie. Perhaps it's a sober reminder of your mortality in the midst of your vainglory, or simply a pile of poop with eyes.
An optical illusion temporary tattoo inspired by art history.
Most contemporary tattoos are graphic signs or symbols related to belief systems or cultural trends. These include text, realistic pictures, cartoon or diagrammatic images, and icons ranging from sentimental to comical. What if tattoos were treated as site-specific art? Rather than depictions or references to images, could a tattoo operate beyond symbology and interpretive meaning and become experiential?
In The Ambassadors (1533), Hans Holbein depicts two men, surrounded by the accoutrements of a learned and cultured society. In the lower part of the painting, an elongated object slashes up and to the right, apparently in front of the posing gentlemen. When seen from a specific oblique angle, the object is revealed as a skull. Holbein’s skull is a vanitas or memento mori, or reminder of mortality. An art theme since antiquity, the memento mori is found on timepieces, funerary structures, painting and sculpture aimed at reminding each of us that we are mortal. In the 16th and 17th centuries, still life paintings with decaying plants and food, often combined with a skull, were a popular motif portraying vanitas, or emptiness.
The skull in The Ambassadors is an anamorphosis, or oblique projection. The technique is one way to generate site-specificity in two-dimensional art. Because the viewer must stand in a specific spot to decode the distorted image, anamorphosis generates spatial awareness as the viewer seeks the correct vantage point.
Site-specific optical illusions inspired by art history.
An art theme since antiquity, memento mori has been a popular motif portraying vanitas, or emptiness, and a humbling reminder of our own mortality.
Advances in optical technology in the early 1600's gave artists new avenues to pursue amazing optical illusions using lenses and mirrors. The growing field of catoptrics—the study of reflected light and mirrors—for the development of astronomical telescopes inspired artists to use curved mirrors for surprising effects.
What was once a novel surface treatment is now fairly commonplace. Chrome pipes and polished tubes are everywhere from bathroom fixtures to office furniture. Memento Mori (Catoptric) takes advantage of these sites to insert a subtle message that this life does not go on forever. In all, one hundred distorted skulls of varying diameters were placed around Pittsburgh. For an unaware public, using the bathroom, commuting to work, operating equipment or visiting a doctor could reveal a small reminder: THOU ART MORTAL.
Project assistance: Kyle Rood
An optical illusion based on art history.
In The Ambassadors (1533), Hans Holbein depicts two men, surrounded by the accoutrements of a learned and cultured society. In the lower part of the painting, an elongated object slashes up and to the right, apparently in front of the posing gentlemen. When seen from an oblique angle, the object is revealed as a skull. This effect is an anamorphosis, an image projected obliquely to a picture plane that can only be seen from the original projection point. Holbein’s skull is a memento mori, or reminder of mortality. Using various software, the skull perspective is corrected and distorted anew, and redrawn with dots of varying diameters. Mounted on a surface and seen from the correct vantage point, a new memento mori appears, normally obfuscated by the seemingly random pattern of elliptical dots seen from elsewhere.
Where does contemporary art live if we have access to everything from the little screens in our pockets?
In collaboration with Dan Moore and Addie Wagenknecht.
Finalist for permanent installation at House for Electronic Art, (HeK), Basel, Switzerland.
Here, There, Everywhere is a simple, analog matrix of interchangeable tiles which will act as fiducial markers (reference grid) for online Augmented Reality (known as “AR”) artwork. Augmented Reality places digital media (3D models, videos, animations, still images) into a live, real-time view from a mobile device’s camera. The technology uses precise optical alignments to “fix” a digital artifact to a physical object. It combines digital effects and physical reality through your phone or tablet. The grid at HeK will be a modifiable and adjustable set of markers as the anchor for equally variable digital works.
At HeK’s discretion, an artist or group of artists will propose a visual arrangement for the tiles to be seen on Freilager-Platz. This unique physical arrangement will correspond to a purely digital work to be experienced through a purpose-built Augmented Reality app. Passersby will see a pixelated message or graphic. Those who engage the work digitally will see surprising, cutting edge, amusing or poignant digital messages hidden in plain sight. Here, There, Everywhere represents contemporary digital culture’s paradoxical relationship to concepts of place. The installation is “here”: here at HeK, here in Basel, here in front of me. It is also seen and experienced across Freilager-Platz; it is “over there.” But it’s also in your phone, that magical portal to the digital ether, to the “everywhere.”
brbxoxo (internet speak for "be right back, kisses and hugs") searches online sexcam sites and only broadcasts feeds when the performers are absent.
A project by Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia | Code by Brannon Dorsey
Site: brbxoxo.com
"brbxoxo cuts the performers out of the picture entirely, focusing instead on the small boxes which contain their lives: empty beds, home offices full of family photos, chairs draped in fabric, and all kinds of bleak carpeted interiors. The images flicker and change from one dimly-lit interior to the next, sometimes revealing traces of the sexcam performers’ particular demographics: a lonlely dildo there, a strangely skewed, oversize stuffed animal there. Ultimately, however, these interiors are crushingly normal and pointedly unsexy."
—Claire L. Evans, writing for OMNI Reboot
An art installation revealing the hidden faces and spaces of the "gig economy."
Gig Faces, Gig Spaces is an installation of people at work. They are not “at work” in the traditional sense. They are at home, performing “Human Intelligence Tasks” (HITs) on the crowdsourcing labor site Amazon Mechanical Turk. “MTurk" connects laborers around the world with requesters looking for data entry, image tagging, filling out surveys, and other menial tasks simple enough for humans, but challenging for computers to do accurately. (This includes the English-Korean translation of this text you are reading).
For USD1.00, I asked workers to video themselves completing mTurk tasks. The length of the video equals the amount of time it takes to perform USD1.00 worth of tasks for others, sometimes taking as long as fifteen minutes. My task request essentially doubles the value of the mostly mindless tasks they perform.
We can’t see the tasks they are performing, but we see the faces and spaces of new labor: domestic settings all around the world, with workers’ faces locked in the view, eyes darting around their screens as they earn pennies for mostly mindless tasks.
Commissioned by and installed at the 2017 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism
Looking at art from a different angle.
Incident Angles is an ongoing project documenting paintings in museums around the world. In hanging artwork and their accompanying lighting, museums take care to avoid offending glare, displaying their art in the most even and flattering light. Adjusting exposure and vantage point, familiar paintings are transformed, elucidating the subtle relief in old master paintings as well as the varied lighting strategies and ceiling treatments designed to be invisible to the viewer.
Included in PABLO GARCIA: FLAT at Novella Gallery
08 February—02 March 2014
Imagine Twitter, only slower. And bigger.
In collaboration with Jon Rubin.
The Last Billboard is a 36 foot long rooftop billboard located on the corner of Highland and Baum in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Each month a different individual is invited to use the billboard. The custom designed billboard consists of a rail system with heavy wooden letters that are changed by hand.
Website: The Last Billboard
Slow-motion selfies.
An update to the familiar self-operated photo booth, this booth shoots a brief 3-second video at 1000 frames per second. Once captured, integrated software stretches the video to nearly one minute, slowing quick action to reveal normally imperceptible movements.
Team:
Design: Pablo Garcia and Spike Wolff
Software/Hardware Design: Riley Harmon and Dan Wilcox
Booth Construction: Kyle Rood
Camera Provided by: Matt Kearney of Fastec Imaging
Lighting Provided by: Gil Penderly of Visual Instrumentation Corp
Support provided by The Jill Watson Family Foundation. Commissioned for the 2011 Watson Festival, Carnegie Mellon University.
See Tees Differently
Most tees are the same: splashy graphic or logo centered on a shirt for others to read. Vantage Tees are site-specific art pieces using optical illusions and body-specific effects to change everything about how people interact with their attire. Some shirts look different if you are looking at them or wearing them. Some ask you to be really close or really far. Others take time to see them. Vantage Tees will look different to everyone—it all depends on your vantage point.
Vantage Tees: Anamorphosis
Almost simultaneous with the codification of perspective in the 15th century, distortions and perversions of perspective became part of the rise of verisimilitude in drawing. Anamorphosis, a cousin of perspective, is an image projected obliquely against a surface, obfuscating the content until the viewer stands at the point of projection. This distortion was immediately popular because of the ability to hide subversive images, typically political messages or erotic imagery--useful in an age of royal court intrigue and pious decorum. Erhard Schön, student of Albrecht Dürer, was especially talented in his anamorphic projections, producing erotic murals visible only to the lord of the house from his private bedroom.
The contemporary t-shirt has enjoyed a central place in popular culture, where images can announce counter-culture messages, declarations of beliefs, and signs of tribe membership. All t-shirts face out; they are all intended for frontal presentation to the public. What if that traditional role was reversed? Vantage Tees contain anamorphic images that only the wearer can decipher. The shirts contain images not generally acceptable to the public: erotic and explicit sexual imagery, politically sensitive messages, and extremely violent images of death. These are all images that are custom to the wearer, both in content and distortion. Different body types yield different surfaces onto which images are projected; a pregnant woman yields a different distortion than an athletic male.
See Tees Differently
Most tees are the same: splashy graphic or logo centered on a shirt for others to read. Vantage Tees are site-specific art pieces using optical illusions and body-specific effects to change everything about how people interact with their attire. Some shirts look different if you are looking at them or wearing them. Some ask you to be really close or really far. Others take time to see them. Vantage Tees will look different to everyone—it all depends on your vantage point.
Vantage Tees: Near/Far
Near/Far alters the common t-shirt's range of clarity. Most tees, with a message or graphic, are meant to be read from up close or at least within the general space of the wearer. Details are usually lost from a distance, making the effective range of a t-shirt about 25 feet. Simultaneously, there is no mystery about a shirt's message; when up close the message is often unambiguous and concise. Near/Far subverts the clarity by printing images in incredibly low-resolution dot printing. From up close, a viewer sees black and white dots, making a seemingly random pattern. From over 50 feet away, an image appears, inverting the standard perception arrangement: facial details disappear but the shirt's message is legible.
Like Vantage Tees: Anamorphosis, the shirt is transformed into a provocation, challenging standards of appropriate material to be shown in public. In this version, the image is of a nude female torso, positioned to appear at scale to the wearer. From a distance, the image appears to dematerialize the shirt, showing an x-ray view. Worn on a woman, it becomes a provocative demonstration of what may or may not be their nude body. On a male body, the image displays the same nudity but also an incongruence that makes distant viewers question the wearer's gender. On either body, the provocation occurs at the boundary of common public decency; the image is generally unacceptable for public consumption, but at the distance required to discern its content, the wearer's facial details are unclear.
See Tees Differently
Most tees are the same: splashy graphic or logo centered on a shirt for others to read. Vantage Tees are site-specific art pieces using optical illusions and body-specific effects to change everything about how people interact with their attire. Some shirts look different if you are looking at them or wearing them. Some ask you to be really close or really far. Others take time to see them. Vantage Tees will look different to everyone—it all depends on your vantage point.
Vantage Tees: Afterimage
Afterimage exploits a simple ocular defect: staring at one color for too long will "burn out" the eye's retinal cones and create a ghost image in the inverse color. The shirt uses bright, bold colors on both front and back shirt panels. A viewer stares at the registration dot, in the center of the shirt, and then quickly stares at the reverse panel. Staring for a few seconds, an inverse afterimage appears, either causing color overlaps, vibrating adjacencies, or unexpected color fields.
See Tees Differently
Most tees are the same: splashy graphic or logo centered on a shirt for others to read. Vantage Tees are site-specific art pieces using optical illusions and body-specific effects to change everything about how people interact with their attire. Some shirts look different if you are looking at them or wearing them. Some ask you to be really close or really far. Others take time to see them. Vantage Tees will look different to everyone—it all depends on your vantage point.
Vantage Tees: Blindspot
Blindspot prints an image precisely where the wearer cannot see. The image is a photo-realistic, full scale image of the owner's skin, exposing a wide collar and almost full back. While the public sees a revealing image of the wearer, the owner, from their vantage point, only sees a simple blank white tee.
What happens when you use technology "incorrectly"?
Unfiltered and unedited iPhone Panoramas, shot on location using only an iPhone 5 and the iOS7 Camera App in Panorama mode.
Two dancers, one camera, one projector, one screen, one mirror. Endless combinations.
This dance fractures and distorts the relationship between two figures through a variety of visual filters. Dancers move through various thresholds of space defined by the frame of a camera and its simultaneous projection. The camera frame overlaps its live feed projection after reflecting in a large ballet mirror. The overlap creates a feedback zone, which multiplies the images created by figures crossing the video cone of vision. As dancers cross the various projection fields, their image, shadows and reflections supplement physical movements with virtual counterpoint. Boundary crossings are translated into multiple virtual dancers in the form of projection, shadow, and mirror figures.
The accompanying music and the choreography are a fugue—a contrapuntal theme and variation in which multiple voices are added subsequent to an expository phrase. The dancers begin center stage, free of the visual impact zones. They soon spiral outwards, crossing projection cones, revealing various screen compositions. The dance climaxes with the maximum permutations of virtual dancers repeating the initial theme.
Experiments in analog, three-dimensional, lens-less photography.
A Photogram does not have an original image to re-present as in photography; it becomes an image once a projection occurs, resulting in a unique shadow made by the variables of the light source and the intervening objects—a material effect of the lucis interruptus.
Photogram is an odd name for the camera-less craft; while a photograph captures light onto a light-sensitive surface, a photogram relies on a shadow to make the image. The paper goes black under exposure, but the objects block the light, casting a shadow onto the paper, and that is the image you see. The places NOT exposed are the photogram. It should probably be called a Sciagram, or “shadow drawing”. Removing the lens from the equation fundamentally changes the projection paradigm. A lens transposes with such fidelity, we still see the apparent depth and other real-world information. In essence, it is a mirror–what you see is transposed to the film plane.
By distorting the paper surface into a modulating landscape, the projected light describes the surface articulation in varying degrees of shade and shadow. Light glancing along an edge of paper produces a lighter shade of gray than direct perpendicular contact. Developer is poured into the crumpled paper at varying heights, allowing time to seek level. The developing agents react to exposed areas leaving contour lines inscribed into the photosensitive landscape. The print is then dried and pressed, registering the former landscape in light.
Experiments in architecture and weather, at the human scale.
Architecture has traditionally had a direct relationship with weather: that of keeping it out or accommodating fair weather. But can the weather offer any new and generative directions for architecture?
To measure the subtle microclimates present in all spaces, a device carrying a series of thermometers takes instant temperature readings at vertical one-foot intervals. The data is transformed into thermographs--contour drawings of the temperature variations.
A second thermographic device was made to directly translate the temperature readings into visual form. The thermometers, placed in a one-foot grid three wide and six high, are connected to a ruled system of gauges. The discrepancies between the readings produce a physical displacement of the brass pistons. The form that results is a thermally derived landscape: a thermoscape translation from fluctuating micro-climates.
Speculative weather-based manipulations of Modern Architecture.
Weather is a vehicle through which architecture can deal with the legacy of Modernism. A century of rigid formal orthodoxy and exuberant, naïve reliance on technology has negated thousands of years of climatic architectural lessons. We revere the spaces Modernism invented, and the contemporary freedom to invent is also a legacy of the revolution formed between the World Wars, but airtight steel and glass boxes stand as an affront to the 21st century need to address energy and environmental concerns.
Paralleling meteorological mapping, a thermographic device was transported to Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in Plano, IL. This house, glass on all four sides a raised above the ground, is an essay of antipathy to weather. These conditions generate complex and dynamic thermal contour maps despite the architecture's orthodox rectilinearity. With the mappings complete, mathematical algorithms create a thermal inversion of the house, regulating the temperature throughout the house to a comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit. This process distorts the house, exploding it outwards to accommodate the contour shift. The resulting house thermally fulfills the promise of the original's image: one of uniformity, clarity and precision. The copy, however, loses the image of the original, becoming a twisted and warped shell in thermally perfect comfort.
This experimental film short is an exploration into the journey from witness to memory. Mnemonic devices, recording devices and memento items condense and encapsulate the richness of the five senses into an objective form. In the film, the rigid cross form is juxtaposed against the erotic and fleeting details of a female ‘character’. The contrapuntal performance tries to focus the viewer on the act of memory creation, capturing strange collisions and compositional combinations between the two opening elements. There is also a phenomenal contrast between the flat and graphic nature of the cross and the depth and sculptural qualities of the body sequence. By the end of the piece, the disparate elements of the events are washed out by their coexistence in memory only to be supplanted by the mnemonic device.
Hopes, fears, buffering: an art installation for your mobile device.
Everything is faster, and yet we still wait. Loading, booting (and rebooting), buffering—represented in spinning wheels, progress bars and completion percentages are the imposed pauses on our daily lives. A click takes an instant. The hope for a response grows stronger during that interminable wait. Waiting looks at the most mundane part of our day through the graphic representations built to help us wait.
The spinning wheel’s sole purpose is to assure us that things have not frozen, merely loading. But the spinners are subject to the same glitches they are there to hide. Angst arises quickly when the spinning wheel stops spinning, if even for a split second. All we can do is wait.
As part of group show /Glitch each artist is represented by an AR-code – an augmented reality marker embedded with visual information that can only be viewed with the aid of a computer or smart-phone. As visitors walk through the gallery, they can interact with the markers using either their smart-phone or one of the tablets that will be provided by the gallery. When a visitor points their phone at the marker for Waiting, one of several handmade spinning wheel GIFs appears on their phone. And because they're endlessly looping, Waiting tests their patience. They wait for the artwork to appear; not realizing that the spinning wheel is the artwork.
A Project by Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia
Made for "Economics + The Immaterial", an exhibit for Run Computer Run (Part of /GLITCH) At Rua Red (South Dublin Arts Centre), Ireland.
A personal reconstruction of small topographies.
Sectional Travelogue (Catalog of Trackside Profiles as Determined by Light and Shadow, Reconstructed as Individual Sections) documents a weekly early morning train trip I took for several years. The particular alignment of the train's orientation to the rising sun converted the gap between train cars into a sliver of sunlight that would rise and fall with the trackside topography.
Using an algorithm to skew the perspectival video footage to flat sections, the sliver of light become an accurate topographical section of this hour-long trip. Transferred to glass the sections recompile into a three-dimensional model of the trip.
Included as part of Parallel Projections, University of Michigan Architecture Gallery, 2008
Moon Marks is a proposed series of drawings on the moon.
Conceived as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Lunar X-Prize team, Moon Marks proposes using the rover tracks to draw on the Moon. One of the first activities that the rover might carry out on the Moon is a series of drawings to announce our arrival, and reflect on what it means to gaze back at Earth.
In the history of humankind, the desire to make marks, and tell a story through pictorial means, is fundamental. Ancient drawings on cave walls, made by artist over 50 millennia ago, serve as the earliest record of human culture. Just as the immortal boot-prints compacted by the first visitors to the Moon have outlived their makers, this series of lines, deliberately traced in the regolith, may last for many generations long after our civilization has faded away.
One drawing might be that of a large and venerable circle, among the most universal and broadly meaningful geometric figures in nature. On a large-scale, the circle circumscribes a space, implying the foundations of a dwelling, the perimeter of a sundial, or a portrait of Earth – the most prominent object on the lunar horizon. Smaller Moon drawings executed on the surface will be selected from among thousands submitted by children and adults, and narrowed down to the most popular using crowd-sourcing technologies allowing users to vote on their favorites.
A Project by Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia
Made for "The Gig is Up" at V2 Lab for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
The Webcam House Series posits domestic spatial organizations based on the boundaries of webcams and other telecommunication devices. In the 21st century, notions of public and private are altered by the visual transmission of interiors to a global public. These projects imagine how image projection and other realtime visual technologies reorder the domestic sphere.
Bicamera House
Any parliamentary representative by definition lives two lives: as a Minister of Parliament and as a member of a constituency. In 2009, widespread abuses of Ministers’ residential allowances were uncovered, triggering questions about Parliamentary procedures. The UK Parliament Expenses Scandal underscores the inherent problems in maintaining two lives. A minister must be responsible for duties in Westminster and to the constituents back home.
With recent advances in communication technologies, the MP expenses scandal highlights the unnecessary and at times absurd requirement that an MP ever reside in their constituency. The real issue is not the abuse of expenses, but the redundancy of paying for two places of residence. An MP speaks for their constituents in Parliament, but an MP speaks to their constituents through television. Physical presence in a constituency is no longer required to govern effectively.
This project proposes a reorganization of residential and representative priorities. All MPs will live in Westminster. Ministers live in common housing by county. Larger counties acquire larger buildings to renovate into Minister Housing, allocating approximately 150 square meters per MP. Within their spaces, the Ministers have both office and personal space. The office space is defined by two webcams perpetually focused on the MP at work. One webcam is the “constituency” camera, with a backdrop representative of their constituency; the other is the “Westminster” camera, creating an image of ministerial authority. Rather than a mere backdrop, the spaces are authentic and full three-dimensional scenes, carving out space in the residence to work as a public servant and visible figure.
In this organizational strategy, the MPs are fully conscious of the public’s ability to view them at work. Occupying the projection cone of the camera means that the Minister is visible to both MPs and their electorate. Private spaces (toilet, bed, etc.) are spaces that occur outside the bicameral cones. As MPs are living together within a unit, the planning of private spaces are forced to exist around the workspace of the webcam view. In the new scheme, traditional notions of domestic public and private transform to private space and space owned by the public.
The Webcam House Series posits domestic spatial organizations based on the boundaries of webcams and other telecommunication devices. In the 21st century, notions of public and private are altered by the visual transmission of interiors to a global public. These projects imagine how image projection and other realtime visual technologies reorder the domestic sphere.
Keeping Up Appearances
The Jones family, like many, owns an oversized suburban home rapidly depreciating in value. They are long-time suburbanites with multiple cars, long commutes, and suburban ideals of neighborhood conformity. As nationwide tensions grow in the face of financial unease, the entire neighborhood steps up their usual glances at fellow suburbanites’ lifestyles to find local indicators of suburbia’s future.
More than 50% of America lives in suburbia. It remains popular, especially to populations new to the suburban lifestyle. Meanwhile, alternative employment models have made suburbia increasingly viable, as new generations telecommute and make friends online. Social networks are no longer limited to physical proximity, as employment and online communities collapse spatial barriers.
The Smiths, city dwellers since graduating from college, move to the suburbs for more space. They move into the Jones’ house that has been subdivided to comfortably accommodate two families. They share entry and circulation, but have private quarters. The Joneses, keeping their consumption conspicuous, divide their house into zones visible to neighbors through windows, and “blind spots”—places in their house invisible to prying eyes. The Smiths live in the Jones’ blind spots, satisfying neighborhood expectations, telecommuting and living a sustainable lifestyle. The Joneses, meanwhile, live in the Smith blind spots, just outside their webcam cameras, giving the Smiths a suburban equivalent online.
The Webcam House Series posits domestic spatial organizations based on the boundaries of webcams and other telecommunication devices. In the 21st century, notions of public and private are altered by the visual transmission of interiors to a global public. These projects imagine how image projection and other realtime visual technologies reorder the domestic sphere.
Cinema and its derivative media have encoded a set of conventions in our visual language. These visual devices turn people into an AUDIENCE, prepared to engage in images constructed as an ILLUSION, all in the service of a narrative. Cinema has been able to go where architecture cannot—into incongruous spatial arrangements and temporally disjunctive sequences. Architecture can, however, serve as an armature for cinematic experiments, blurring the boundaries that separate our interior and exterior lives.
A residence, especially since the advent of visual media such as cinema, photography, television, and the internet, has become a stage for an exterior public. Beyond mere voyeurism, we are now part of a permanent audience, seeing cinema not as a parallel to the real world, but the real world as cinematic. Cinema is the baseline for our visual language, and, at times, real life confusingly parallels cinema.
In film and theater, the Fourth Wall is the imaginary surface through which an audience perceives the action. Actors perform in a space of three walls, typically ignoring the invisible fourth as the audience watches through it. A movie audience watches the implied depths of unfolding cinematic spaces flatten as a projection onto the screen surface.
Fourth-Wall House uses the devices of cinema to construct narratives steeped in everyday stories as well as fantasy and illusion, turning the mere act of peering into a neighbor’s house a cinematic experience. By using cameras and image projections (live feeds as well as broadcast and recorded images), the house introduces various media into a residential space. It uses mirrors, translucent screens, lights that cast shadows and printed imagery to assemble an illusory world, seen to the ever-present audience as both real events and fabricated realities.
This exhibit was curated and designed as part of ART&&CODE 3D 2011, held at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon. The exhibit contained original 3D devices from the last 125 years, displayed to encourage audience first-hand experience. From the exhibit literature:
21st century 3D technology is the third great craze over stereoscopy. The late 19th century introduced the stereoview to the masses, only to see its decline in the age of cinema. Hollywood resurrected the technology in the mid twentieth century for monster movies, launching a popular fad for plastic red and blue glasses. As Avatar and the Kinect mark the newest iteration of stereoscopic entertainment, this exhibit looks at centuries of popular three-dimension images and devices—some part of mass entertainment, some as niche applications of stereoscopic techniques.
Something as seemingly simple as binocular vision did not have an author until Sir Charles Wheatstone. In 1838, he described stereopsis as the complex coordination of two slightly different vantage points from each eye to create the illusion of depth. What is probably more remarkable was that he was able to synthesize this process with lenses, mirrors, and a pair of images made from the same vantage point discrepancy. Stereoscopy, as a science, was born. To become entertainment, Wheatstone’s discovery was fortunate to be made precisely at the same time as the invention of another great optical process: photography. Once photography came of age, and amateurs became fluent in making images, 3D images—stereoviews—invaded the homes and parlours of a populace hungry for visual entertainment.
Stereoscopy—as a form of popular entertainment—enthralls the masses because of its magical and wondrous illusion. In that vein, it fits neatly alongside other Victorian devices of illusion and wonder. The high watermark for stereoscopy in the 19th century coincides with magic lantern projections and phantasmagoria, popular photography, and cinema’s ancestors like the kinetoscope and mutoscope. Opticality was all the rage, and it gave birth to the Modern paradigm of vision we now refer to as mass media. But while the other optical toys of the Victorian age continuously evolved into forms we now today, 3D images would occasionally appear to enthrall and delight only to be dismissed or superseded and then rise again. Magic lanterns and flip-book images became cinema, photography evolved into color and digital versions of its former self. Stereoscopy comes and goes with generational frequency, as though the wonder wears off until a new, unaware population grows up and discovers it all over again.
It’s very much de rigueur to weigh in on the successes and shortcomings of the seeming avalanche of 3D movies this past decade. Everyday someone promotes a 3D experience as revolutionary as another denounces it all as a fad. It’s quite possible all the stereoscopy conversation going on at this Art&&Code workshop will be moot in ten years as 3D hibernates until the next time around. But perhaps this time it sticks because it is not only a form of mass entertainment, and the wonder comes not from the 3D illusion, but how easy it is to participate in the stereoscopic sandbox. And—as those who applied 3D to other fields beyond entertainment in the lull periods—perhaps the future of 3D is not merely watching movies with fancy glasses, but new potential for the next age of digitally-inspired vision.
Exhibit designed and curated by Pablo Garcia from items in his collection.
Installation team: Madeline Gannon, Chris Williams, Spike Wolff
Solo exhibition, Novella Gallery, New York, NY
“I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.” –Edwin A. Abbott, Opening lines to Flatland (1884)
The world is flat. Perhaps that sounds ridiculous these days, but consider the depth contained in two dimensions. After all, we now ingest our world through images on flat screens. This is not a deficit to denounce. Instead, marvel at the richness possible in limited dimensionality: Implied depth through perspectival clues, modeling forms with light and shadow, and oblique viewing angles. A site-specific image can both flatten the real world and extract dimensions from the image. The long, narrow, and subterranean space of Novella Gallery offers an opportunity to experiment in two dimensions; to celebrate our flat world.
An analog look at the quintessential digital object.
The Utah Teapot is a beloved staple of the computer graphics community and one of the most important objects in the history of computing. Martin Newell, while a PhD student at the University of Utah, modeled a teapot as a test for new rendering and shading algorithms he was developing. Since his first model in 1975, the Utah Teapot has been the "Hello, world!" of computer graphics—first tests of material, shading, reflection algorithms are almost always teapots.
These photographs are decidedly analog but, like the computer teapot, are made with light and illusory. Carefully staged lighting strikes a glass teapot, creating two-dimensional shadows that pop as 3D teapots.
