Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2015 19:24:57 +0000
From: Robert M Ochshorn
Subject: grids from the plane
i may test out the yet-to-be-developed kinect-zoom-grids at an installation at emerson college in boston at the end of the month…

on the flight to london, i made another pass at the moving-zooming-columns. small steps forward, lots of work to be done.

r

Begin forwarded message:

From: Robert M Ochshorn
Subject: Some ideas for Emerson
Date: February 11, 2015 at 5:00:46 PM GMT
To: Dalida Maria Benfield

Dear Dalida,

This is a rendering of all of the individual frames (~9000) in DIABLO EN LA PIEL, where each “column” is one minute of video.


I’m interested in how to show all of the frames at different levels of scale/zoom/abstraction. Here’s a rendering of a sort of zoom into the video (you may need to manually scrub through this to understand it):


In an exhibition context, I imagine this as a body-controlled interface, and one that should be experienced in rather the reverse order: as you get closer to (“approach”) the image (projection? large TV/monitor?), you start seeing more and more frames, smaller and smaller. In a way, moving closer takes you to the “truth” of the video—a series of frames—but adds a critical-rational distance that makes it nearly impossible to parse/understand.

Think of it as the “map” of a single video. It’s possible to imagine it self-contained on one display, but I think it would be better to have a second (screen or projection) that is a more conventional video player, synchronized with and controlled by this grid. It’s a “map,” but this map is itself a video. If you’ll excuse the inlining of an animated gif (depending on your email client, you may need to save it and open it in a webbrowser to see it move), consider this “barber-shop” rendering of the middle-zoom-level, cycling through all of the frames:


Here’s an interactive version, where I can move my mouse to adjust the level of detail, this time applied to Silent Power. I love that the credits are frozen in the first few seconds, and the parabolic shapes of the actors is very beautiful. I’m going a little overboard with the mouse (to test “performance,” &c), but it does make me wonder if the transitions (between the levels) are too discrete… I’ll have to think about if I can smooth them out.



There are certainly more things to work out, but I think I have an idea of how I would like to proceed with the exhibition. Let’s talk soon so I can clarify a few things that are undoubtably vague in this mail.

I hope this isn’t too far from what you were expecting… it will be “offline,” but will not carry with it the rhetoric of an off-grid Internet node. Lately I’ve been thinking that if you are in a space for video, the space should be an important part of how you access the video, with correspondingly less emphasis on the “personal,” or singular, of a computer. I would like to talk more about the conceptualization of the show to make sure that this diversion still makes sense with what you’re thinking about. Of course, if you simply want to run InterLace, that’s easy to do—it’s already written—but I thought it would be nice to push forward some new thoughts with this occasion. 

LOGISTICS

This is somewhat more ambitious than simply running InterLace on a workstation. I will be arriving to Boston at 3pm on Thursday the 27th, and would expect to need at least four hours between then and the opening to set up, ideally with a gallery installer present at least some of the time. Are you up for a little scramble?

The equipment required is:
—  a (reasonably) modern computer running OS X or Linux (a Mac Mini is probably the easiest to communicate with the gallery)
— two image-making things. it’s hard for me to say what combination of projectors, computer monitors, and televisions will work best without knowing more about the space available—let’s discuss this?
— a few cameras and depth sensors. i’ve been using fairly old technology, so these are cheap—the webcams I use cost $9/each online, and the depth sensor is $40. i’m happy to bring these, but if there’s a chance of setting them up in advance, maybe it’s worth you ordering a few…


This is all coming from the airplane en route to London. I’ll be running an intensive workshop for the next week, so may be a little terse with follow-up, but I’m very excited to see if we can put something together! The material you’ve uploaded is very beautiful, and much of it seems well-suited to a “simultaneous” viewing. 

Your obedient servant,

R.M.O.