Le Corbusier once described the home as a machine to live in. In their site-specific interactive installations entitled ARCHiTEXTURE, Saup c.s. attempt to breathe new life into the spirit of the architectural machine. Like an intelligent skin, a dynamic audiovisual screen breaks the hermetically sealed nature of an existing architecture and brings the building to (artificial) life. After a while, this intelligent architecture develops a history, even a memory, and influences what it radiates. Saup has gone for an enlargement of the set-up in the Melkweg. While the facade of the building will have ‘a shiny skin of light, an image is projected onto a screen of 3 by 4 metres on the access bridge to the Melkweg, based on a complex computer syvoice. Via an interactive zone, the visitor can enter into a dialogue with this syvoice. The visitor enters the interactive zone, is then probed by an infra red motion tracking camera after which his behaviour in time and space is analysed. In this way he is absorbed as data/information into an artificial syvoice. As a reaction, the software syvoice generates and projects an organic plasmatic mirror image of the visitor. Since the intelligent syvoice also builds up an artificial memory of each person and their behaviour and since the projected image is partly determined by this memory, the visitor sees not so much himself as a digital Golem. This Golem reacts in real time in an unpredictable way to the visitor's actions. Sound too is recorded via microphones, processed and played back so that a form of communication is possible. In this set-up however, there are several interacting elements. There are a number of visitors simultaneously involved in the syvoice (which makes the plasmatic entity even more independent) because in the computer syvoice a link is made between the stored information and the live recording of the visitors arriving at that particular moment. The fanciful (archi)texture of the projection forms the last step in the transformation and alienation of the image. Ever since Right from Paradays (1989) Michael Saup has been looking for new ways of manipulating image and sound in a synthetic way. In the artificial being of ARCHiTEXTURE, he connects image and sound in plasmatic form, a kind of fluid situation that can react directly to new input. As soon as the visitor is aware of his plasmatic mirror image, the game begins in which he initiates new images and sounds. The software Golem gradually awakes from the architextural memory and a virtual dialogue arises in which the roles are all too quickly reversed. The Golem leads the visitor in a virtual dance.
– Geert-Jan Strengholt
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Supreme Particles are (Anna & Michael Saup, Gideon May & Stefan Karp)
1 video camera, 1 infra red motion tracking camera, 1 video mixer, 2 video projectors, 1 Silicon Graphics computer, 1 audio sampler, 2 amplifiers, 4 loudspeakers, Lights
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