I’m new to blogging, so please bear with me. I hope you find this interesting.
Two days ago, I was talking with Eva Judkins from the Electric Eel about things that we might do together on Werderplatz. We had spent about half an hour examining different ideas, brainstorming, when a picture appeared in my head. What if people were transparent and light could travel through them as if they were made of glass or water? I almost immediately had the urge to sit down and work on a prototype of this idea. I finished a first version today. You can see the pictures below.
I have always liked the idea of people cooperating in front of art installations, to very casually and harmonically get in contact with each other. The interaction human-machine and machine-human can cause complete strangers to temporarily engage in a joyful human to human interaction. Without the connecting artwork, there would be no point of contact and nothing would happen between them.
Also, for this installation, I did not want to project onto the people. I think that if you project onto people, you can place them somewhere. But projecting under their feet makes it difficult for them to, for example, dance, and look at the projection for a long time themselves. Projecting onto people works better for an audience that is outside this “staged” area. And in this case it would be more difficult to create the illusion that you are made of transparent matter.
In the prototype of this work, light flows from one side, in this case from left to right. People standing further right will be illuminated by the light that flows through people standing further upstream on the left. Every person in the beam can refocus, spread or concentrate the beam. So people on the lower end are at the mercy of the people at the upper end. But people on the lower end will shine in much brighter colors than the ones in control.
I hope I will be able to show this work sometime soon.