Here’s a prototype for a new project. It’s a 40 x 10 ft., three-projector installation running about 2000 videos. Stay tuned for more documentation as the project develops.
UPDATE: Go here to see the most recent version.
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This is incredible. Where do you have it set up? What’s the content going to be? Wow.
Thanks. It is installed in the performance and installation space in Regis Center for the Art. Content … hmm. Well, I’m still working on that one. Right now each video represents is a lone, solitary actor speaking from a private space (homes, bedrooms, etc) into the world — the typical “video log”. Ultimately, I’m interested in the way that contemporary technologies successfully produce a multiplicity of speakers … but fail to produce listeners. So the democratic power of technology seems fall short in this way. It’s fine if everyone has a voice — there is power in that idea — but who is listening?
I’ve seen a similar project somewhere, with the added feature that a camera captured the people looking at the installation and the installation positioned the videos in a way that the different colors, brightnesses of the single videos mimicked the picture taken by the camera (like the static versions seen in print, where thousands of little images form a big one).
It looked pretty amazing (as it was realtime!) and I think they even captured live TV off the air. I wonder, though, how they did this with the limited computing power some years ago… (maybe a big cluster?)
Anyway, today this would require only 2 current GPUs to run, I guess…
Indeed the tech-part is an outstanding question. I too have seen a piece like the one you have mentioned — in fact, I helped work on a similar video-wall “mirror” by a student here just a few weeks back. For this project, I’m less interested in the “interactivity” — and more interested in the possibility of bringing a whole lot of videos up quickly and simply letting them play as they come. If you happen to come up with the name of the piece you are referring to, I’d love to know it.
Good stuff. Would be interesting to pair with a filter that allows users to focus the audio to hear some subset of the audio tracks. Listens is about both listeners AND attention (lack of noise). Anyway, great work!
Very interesting !
How did you made it?
I would appreciate any kind of explanation. I will like to make my own Gallery and try to play with a little bit of interactivity.
Well done man.
Great Project! Looks really interesting. I’m interested in the way that the wall plays up the back and forth between individuals and groups. What I mean is that something as simple as one person talking to one camera becomes a wall of noise (visual and auditory) when they are all combined. You can see all of the parts which are windows into more complex situations and as they are built up into the wall that complexity increases in a way that makes it simple again and quite beautiful. I wish I could see it sometime in real life.
So are you listing your sources?
Well, I’m not sure if you mean my source code or my sources of artistic inspiration — which did you mean?
Amazing!
This is very intriguing conceptual piece. What software programs did you use to create this piece? What is the length of time for this piece? (I am guessing you will have it on a loop.)
Your source material (not your code), are you listing the original creators of the video that you are using in your work.
Hi an E,
That’s a good question — I don’t currently list exact sources because none of them are currently heard individually. It’s more taking a field recording in a crowded public space — it’s difficult to attribute words to individuals (which is kind of the point of this project for me). I suppose I could create a list of youtube ids / usernames or something. I definitely keep all of that information in a database. Since this version is still in process, I haven’t considered how that might be done … I’ll think on that. If you have any suggestions let me know … cb
Here we go:
“none of them are currently heard individually”
But they’re there, you can see them, and they ‘are’ individuals (they are separated by the frames of each original image that they were recorded within as separate entities). Yes, simply placing them on the same field turns them into a mass; but they still are a quilt of individuals.
I think that we’re coming into an ethical question here. How can you say its a “field recording in a crowded public space” when you have all of the specific url locations, names, and information about each person? You sure as hell don’t have that in a train station where you record people’s sounds and voices that they create unconciously. By not having that information, that is in a simple way what makes a site specific ambient recording so important; its anonimty. What you are doing is not the same. You know who these people are.
If you placed a name on the bottom of the image, it could become an addition to the structure of the work. You could place it in the id card; it would be enormous and a correllary example of the mass that you’re invoking with the video itself.
If I place my own ethics or morality into this discussion, I think that gathering other people without giving them a credit is disrespectful; would you like the same to be done to you?
This is a fascinating conversation.