Shadows and Fog: Walk Into the Light in Interactive Projection Experiment

Tunnels – Currents New Media Festival 2013 from jake snider on Vimeo.

Pixels and vectors aside, visualism is work in light. And so, it’s refreshing to see work as direct and evocative as that sent to CDM by reader Jake Snider. It makes interacting with light the centerpiece of the work.

It’s visceral, sensual, and elegant – and keep watching the video above to the very end for a very sweet smooch. (I believe at least some of our time as artists should be spent trying to make work that people make out to. I’ve been successful at that from time to time.)

Jake, inspired by our story on Pfadfinderei’s project for Moderat with a remote-controlled projector into fog, tells us more:

I’ve seen a couple posts recently about fog projection and thought you might be interested in a kind of show I’ve been playing with recently. I’m projecting shapes through fog so that a sort of swirling space is created.

The idea is to look into the projector, and when seen in person you get the feeling of looking into an infinite tunnel of light. It is a strangely comforting experience to be inside the space, one that I disrupt with animation of flashing lights, star points and
growing/shrinking/interacting tunnels. Displaying the show and watching people’s reactions to the light has been very interesting as you see everyone, from children to the elderly, play with blocking the light and pass from “space” to “space” as the understanding of light and space begin to come together.

I have two videos of the project, the first is from the third installation of the project at Currents New Media Festival, the second is a demonstration I made from the earliest experiments with the medium. Hope you enjoy! [Ed.: Those are above and below, respectively.]