Site: Siena

Final Exhibition

2009-07-26T23:00:00.000-07:00

Tonight at 9:00 pm, at AHA offices - 10 La Lizza Siena, Italy will be our final exhibition. If you are in the area please come, otherwise look to this space in the next week for documentation.

Cheers!

Brian and Tyler's theatrics

2009-07-25T12:26:00.002-07:00

Brian and Tyler have been pushing the experimental theater opportunities of the projectors. Supporting each other but ending up in different places. I think it was their initial suggestion of projecting onto faces and statues started us in this direction and it is great to see the multiple directions making it more than a one-off idea. Above is Brian's mask with rig to project Tyler's face back onto Tyler's face for a highly mediated and disjunctive take on communication.

Brian's second project involved projecting himself onto balloons. This time spouting a random play list of dialogue that he wrote. It seemed to become increasingly absurd.

Tyler wrote a strong internal dialogue that then he had with himself as projected onto to Ginger. Ginger sat, eyes closed, and let Tyler have his moment.

The stand in for the self, the need of others, projecting ourselves onto others, the reciprocal nature of identity — interesting territory these guys are getting at.

a test from Venice

2009-07-25T12:21:00.000-07:00

While spending most of our time looking at art at La Biennale di Venezia, Taylor did manage a great test of projecting faces (originally taken with a 4 X 5 camera last term) on to Andrews face.

Here is our group picture from Venice.

progress toward final projects

2009-07-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

A night out in the streets of Siena —tests towards our final show. Dom animated tourists doing what tourists do. One was looking lost, map in hand, the other was climbing the steps of the Duomo. What worked nicely was the performance of the steps —Dom climbing pushing his animation ahead of him, timed out perfectly for the length of the stairs.

Alison also took in the tourists, having to swarming crowds projected onto herself and she make her way up a dark alley.

Erin projected video of her drawing a map of Siena against a lovely ruff pealing wall. The contours of her map following by happenstance the forms on the surface of the wall.

Emilee took on the campo projecting three simultaneous animations that moved from displays of public affection & touching to abstract forms that suggested more touching but also the figures on greek pottery.

Kelly photographed one of those "living statues" who comes alive for whatever money tourists drop in his can. Here he is now a ghost along the same street that he appears in the day time. A specter who could show up here or Berlin or San Fransisco or anywhere.

The statue video

2009-07-21T02:49:00.000-07:00

The video version of the photos posted below. The set up, while sorta awkward, was quite successful for something so spontaneous.

The statue project

2009-07-19T05:45:00.000-07:00

This is the documentation from the first trial of our group statue project. We took one of the projectors and connecting it to a camera were able to produce a live feed. Then, we projected a student's face onto a statue on the side of the Duomo in Siena. While it was quite impromptu, upon discussing it the next day we decided that we would like to make it into an actual group project. This is the first of hopefully several public performances.

Group Projects

2009-07-15T00:47:00.000-07:00

Here are stills from our group projects during week 2. It is definitely hard to get good documentation and I will be looking through some of the video soon to see if that provides a better sense of what we are up to.

Here is the Tartuca group, who rotoscoped out a parade leading the race horse down to the Campo. Across a widing street in Tartuca contrada's part of the city the group used six projector to reenact a parade of the Palio winners.

The second group used four projectors to present sequences of photographs and animation of the crowds watching the Palio and the race itself. The project took place in a dark alley just outside the Campo where the palio was held.

Group 3 responded to the many flags of the contradas and the actual Palio (the race is named for the Flag —Palio— that the winners receive). This group made their own flag to project onto and had their own procession.

at work on group projects

2009-07-09T05:08:00.000-07:00

Here is a selection of the group at work. While the process looks like it could be taking place anywhere in the world both the source of the images and resulting media events are specific to Siena.

this is our set up

2009-07-07T07:24:00.000-07:00

These are our projectors and ipods that we are using this month. It is quite the set up.

disscussion after the first night:

2009-07-06T08:19:00.000-07:00

what works:
- layers of the images, when we projected on the screen and window.
- "ghost" images, when they were projected big on the building.
- walking down the street, ephemeral and loops throughout the city. something that just passes by.
- on the ground, using it as a flashlight.
- sense of energy as performers. The projectors engendered a sense of play.

Nature of the Audience:
- mixed responses from viewers, very interested tourist, Italians seem more circumspect
- we got oooo's from people.
- asked where we got the projectors.
- people who passed by seemed intrigued.
- playing with the projectors and people passing by.
- we have an ephemeral audience.
- later we kept more people out, as we talked to each other.
- will people avoid it, or become apart of it?

Strategies : Performance or Installations
- can we remove ourselves as performers and have the audience focus on the projections.
- when we are stationary, we almost become tripods and disappear — like Bunraku performers
- when we are moving, it's harder for people to confront us.
- hard to hide the projectors. when moving, easy to hide them away as screens.
- maybe as a mobile piece there is always an aspect of performance.
- could viewers be willing or unwilling participant in the act.
- novelty will always be apart of the projects. we will never have the same audience twice. it will always be novel to the people who initially see it.

Images from the first night out

2009-07-06T01:02:00.000-07:00

Using the famous sequence of Eadweard Muybridge's running horse we hit the post Palio streets of Siena.

Experiments in Mobile Projection

2009-07-04T01:31:00.001-07:00

Site Siena

Site Siena is a media arts class offered by the University of Oregon in Siena for the month of July 2009. The class offers UO students the opportunity to explore Siena in depth and have additional trips to Florence and the Venice Biennale. The core of the class is a set of collaborative experiments in creative use mobile projection. Using MPro 110 mini projectors, donated to us by 3M, we are exploring issues such as site specific projection and media performance.

Using mini projectors represent a unique opportunity to explore a new technology before it is fully culturally integrated. As this technology gets incorporated into cell phones the use mobile projection systems will likely become highly culturally codified. At the moment we are at a state of flux as to how and whether this technology will prove to of cultural use — whether mobile projection will reach the level of ubiquity of cell phones and PDAs. It is a prefect cultural moment to explore the creative possibly of mobile projection before the cultural expectations of the technology gains fixity.