Art & Technology

I am taking this course mainly because I am very interested in creating light installations with my sculptures. I am a huge fan of interactive art, and I found a couple of artists that make the viewers part of the experience by making the art react to their presence. I looked at some of the work of Raphael Lozano-Hemmer and was especially intrigued by his 2018 work Vanishing Points. Part of my intrigue comes from the fact that I don't understand how anyone could have made something like this.

http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/vanishing_points.php

I have said before that I am not really skilled with computers, so to be honest I can not fathom how this project was made. I see in the discription it has a 3D sensor. I don't really understand the technology of computers understanding and reacting to your motions work, but in this piece, the installation tracks the heads of the onlookers. It then deforms grids to make vanishing points that look coherent to the onlooker's perspective, but from all other angles they look skewed. When there are two onlookers, the retrospective grids converge and then the piece colorizes. As the two then start to move apart, the colors start to almost disolve.

I'm sure the piece was made with computer software that has cameras and some sort of way for the computer to learn and retain information. According to this piece, when no one is infront of it, it goes back to previous sessions where there were onlookers. I am assuming that although there is one artist's name attached to the piece, I bet he had some help from at least one or two people just in order to test out the sequence with bodies being infront of it. I would assume that with trial and error this piece had to take somewhere from 6 months to 1 year, 1 1/2 years.