Intersections - Nguyen Dang Binh

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Orit Zuckerman
Spotlight
8.5 feet x 6 feet
Art installation, interactive portraits on 16 screens
ARTIST STATEMENT
Spotlight is a set of 16 interactive portraits. Each portrait has a set
of nine “temporal gestures” – photographic-quality sequences of
human gestures such as “looking up.” The portraits are networked
and placed in a 4 x 4 layout. Every few seconds, a randomly selected
portrait looks toward a neighboring portrait. In turn, the neighboring
portrait looks back. To viewers of the installation, these “random discussions”
create a sense of “social dynamics.” Viewers can interrupt
the group dynamics at any time, by selecting one of the 16 portraits.
The remaining 15 portraits automatically react and direct their attention
to the viewer-selected portrait, which reacts with a special
gesture – “being the center of attention.”
Spotlight is about an artist’s ability to create new meaning using the
combination of interactive portraits and diptych or polytych layouts.
The mere placement of two or more portraits near each other is
a known technique to create new meaning in the viewer’s mind.
Spotlight takes this concept into the interactive domain, creating
interactive portraits that are aware of each other’s states and
gestures. So not only the visual layout, but also the interaction
with others creates a new meaning for the viewer.
Using a combination of interaction techniques, Spotlight engages the
viewer at two levels. At the group level, the viewer influences the portraits’
“social dynamics.” At the individual level, a portrait’s “temporal
gestures” expose a lot about the subject’s personality.
Electronic Art and Animation Catalog Art Gallery Artworks
CONTACT
Orit Zuckerman
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Media lab
20 Ames Street
E15-320A
Cambridge, Massachusetts 2139 USA
orit@media.mit.edu
COLLABORATORS
Sajid Sadi
Pattie Maes
TECHNICAl STATEMENT
Spotlight is a system of 16 portrait agents that operate as a distributed
master-slave cluster over TCP/IP. Each portrait agent is a set of
nine gestures, each a sequence of 40 photographic-quality blackand-white
frames, packaged as a QuickTime movie.
There are 16 nodes; each an lCD screen with a built-in computer
system. Each node is able to communicate with the others and display
a portrait clip. At startup, one node is arbitrarily designated as
the master, and all slave nodes are directed to connect to the master
node to form the array. Once connected, each node declares its own
configuration. The agents exist on the server only but are synchronized
with their respective portraits over the network. This design
simplifies communication between nodes, while retaining synchronous,
millisecond-scale control over the video playback.
In idle mode, each agent may randomly choose a neighbor to “converse
with.” When viewers initiate an interaction, the agents all “look”
at the agent selected by a viewer. The target agent then plays its
gesture action, while the other agents resume their standby posture.
The entire array is then reset, and if no further interactions take
place, the agents eventually return to idle mode.