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Perception, Alignment

The visual alignment of stationary objects, objects in motion.

During my wayward youth and as a way to supplement my meager student income I spent a number of years running light shows in clubs in and around London, splicing film and slides from up to a dozen projectors onto pretty much anything that could be projected on. It was a fun way to make a bit of money, learn a visual craft and in an indirect way it served as an apprenticeship to human behavioural research - after all clubs are a decent space to witness and experience the excesses of human nature. It was the early 90's and pretty much all the equipment was manually set up - and the nearest thing we had to a computer was a timer stuck into the back of the Kodak Carousels. Sure the imagery was set up to go with the mood and flow of the venue, but it was no where as sophisticated as today's VJ setups. Which is why it surprised me that when ever we showed movies where people were dancing someone in the audience would come up and ask how we synced the dancing on film to the music in the club. Even when the movie was projected backwards at 3 frames a second. Human perception is a wonderful thing.

In our sensor-filled future the alignment of whatever is being sensed, by whatever or whom-ever is doing the sensing. And the consequences of when that alignment is achieved. And yeah, how to manipulate the gulf between human perceptual inaccuracies and what's actually happening?

As a side note - some of you may be familiar with the Guerilla Projector work of Troika, they're pretty good at self PR and the tech angle - sending text messages to the projector makes for an interesting enough doing-the-rounds-on-the-internet story. I can't help thinking how crap the experience is for everyone except the person standing directly behind the projector taking the photo. I know, I know, experiences be damned.

Writing from Komazawa Koen | August 12, 2007 | Permalink