Frontera v.2 (the playback screen)

THE PLAYBACK SCREEN OR INTERACTIVE PORTRAIT

A randomly chosen character observes the spectator from a glass screen. From his pose and the framing of the shot, he seems to be waiting to be portrayed. The character will carry on like this, breathing and blinking, until the spectator touches the screen. Then, he will come out of his immobility responding with the same gesture, placing his hand and gaze on the user’s hand, following any route it follows. Trapped in this small sequence of gestures the portrayed character meets the present one at an instant of simulated communion, which expresses both the will for communication and the impossibility of it actually happening.

Frontera v.2 / portrait is an interactive installation that works mainly with real-time video manipulation in response to the user's actions. Technically speaking, this work is based on computer vision and motion tracking technologies. A first version of the interactive portrait (Frontera v.1) was developed at the Center for Multimedia, Mexico, and has been successfully shown in numerous venues, and commented in reviews such as the book: from Springer Verlag. During the recently concluded artistic residency at Montevideo, Time Based Arts, Amsterdam, the portrait was improved by developing an open source toolkit that may also be used by other artists. However, the main improvement was the addition of a new component, the videobooth made available for public use. This new component transformed Frontera v.2 in collection of playful self-portraits, thus, a study about the relation of the contemporary subject with his or her own image.