Projected Presence
An ethereal space that invites reflection on our relationship to the objects and memories in our life. The final sculpture consists of two delicate projection screens, each 8’ x 3.5’, that are separated by a small gap. A projector back-projects a 4 and ½ minute animation onto the screens. Together the screens were hand drawn and hand cut to resemble the curtain of a willow tree out of 100 square feet of parchment paper. The strips were then hung from a thin steel frame that swayed gently back and forth as air pushed against the paper, causing the entire structure to animate as if by a gently in the breeze.
The work explores, in part, our physiological sense of presence and what it means to mix temporally disconnected realities into a single physical space.
Video Preview
The full animation features an additional will-o-the-wisp entity and an additional four minutes of performance.
Making Of
In this first iteration of Projected Presence I first recorded a performance in motion capture using Optitrack and Motive. I then imported the motion data into Autodesk Maya and mapped it onto a custom model (left). The virtual 3D scene in Maya was constructed with walls at the same scale and orientation as the final projection screens would appear in real life (middle left). This allowed me to capture shadow and distance data in the 3D space that would mimic a volumetric lighting environment in the real space. I then rendered the shadows cast onto the virtual walls for every frame of the performance and composited them together with other post-processing effects in Adobe Effects (middle right). Finally, I projection-mapped the resulting video onto a custom built screen in the same size and orientation as the virtual walls.
This is a behind-the-scenes video of the first iteration of Projected Presence and walks through the same steps that were used in the final artwork pictured above.