Stop Motion @ RE:NEW

RE:NEW Festival, Copenhagen central square, summer 2008
With extremely short warning I was invited to make something on a huge LED screen that was put up by a electronic music conference in Copenhagen. They had in the last minute got money to built this 8m tall LED video monolith on the central square in Copenhagen for 2 days, and they needed people to make something on it. So Ole Kristensen and I developed in one week an art work called Stop Motion that was developed for this screen. The concept of the art work is a interactive non timeline based stop motion “movie” that is developed over time. On the screen you see a person stand with an ordinary lightbulb in his hand, and from the air there is hanging a lightbulb down. When you take up the lightbulb yourself and move it around in the air, you see a marker move around on the screen in the same way as the bulb, and at the same time images of other people holding the bulb at the same spot as you do are loading on the screen. When you hit a spot where there has not been taken any photos, a countdown begins, and a camera takes a photo of you, and add you to the grid of images of people holding the lighting bulb. 

People really enjoyed playing with the piece, and see them self projected on a big big screen on a spot where many people walks by, and come by later and see them self again.

Because it was made in so little time, it was suffering many technical problems in the begin. We made it in Processing, and the first major major problem with processing is the limit of RAM. We had to save the images in the computers ram, but when we used more then 2 gigabytes of ram it crashed. And loading from harddrive was way to slow. In a later version of this application we ported it to OpenFrameworks witch solved our problems.