elphel camera

Frontera is actually kept at the Jan van Eyck Academy where it was shown in a sort of open studio environment during he opening week and at the Zichtopmaastricht where Jan van Eyck was the focus of the month. This project will be improved at the academy and serve as departing point for my research.

• Possible fields of study suggested by the work Frontera (to be contrasted and complemented with theoretical strand of Just Touch):
o Self image in the age of Facebook
o Touch in general and touch screens in particular.
o Portrayal by the study and depiction of personal
body gestures.
o Interactive high resolution portrayal: midway between photography and HD video.
o The mirror image.
o Prison, imprisonment.

Frontera was the project which brought me to Amsterdam, as an artist in residence at NIMK, Netherlands Institute for Media Art. This project dealt with motion tracking and gesture recognition through two firewire cameras situated at the corners of the screen. More information on the content of the project can be found here:

http://fronteraproject.net

My team-mates in this adventure were:
Robin Gareus, Arjan Scherpenisse and Eelco Wagenaar

The first version of the portrait used proprietary software. For Frontera V.2, all used software was replaced by open source software.

THE VIDEOBOOTH

After interacting with the portrayed character, some spectators will probably wish to become themselves part of the work by being portrayed. The videobooth was created to serve this purpose. This videobooth looks as a large photo booth, but it records video instead of taking pictures. When inside the booth, the user has to perform a set of movements in a game-like environment. Frontera’s program then turns the resulting video sequences into an interactive portrait. After completing the recording session, the user is able to play with his image, or allow others to do so.

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 is an interactive video installation featuring the videobooth: a tool for the creation of interactive portraits and the playback screen for portraits presentation and interaction. Based on FLOSS, computer vision and motion tracking technologies, and with an on-growing collection of over 150 live size portraits, it constitutes a study of the relation between the contemporary subjects and their own images.

This is more or less how frontera will look like - and how it looked at Nimk.

The interactive portrait and videobooth will be shown as part of the Imaginary Property research subjects in Jan van Eyck's opening week From the 11 to the 18 of January 2009