isadora – Alan Winslow

Fitting In

For this project, we were tasked with referencing an art movement. Noah and I worked together again, referencing Harry Who, a 1960’s collective from Chicago. Their work moves both Noah and me. The collective was made up of six artists who created paintings and sculptures of deformed figures, surreal wallpaper, and abstracted everyday objects. They were discussing the difficulty of fitting into this world.

Another component we were drawn to was that they painted directly on acrylic with acrylic paints to give a unique lighting effect.

Our idea:

Using Isadora and a projector, we will have the subject contort themselves to fit within a surreal Harry Who silhouette. The live video feed of the matter will be recorded then played back to the viewer. To get the subject/viewer to engage, they will be presented with a silhouette and told to fit in. After six seconds of recording, the silhouette will disappear, and the video will be played back on a randomly generated background (another reference to Harry Who’s a unique use of wallpaper in their shows).

Bellow is the production and piece documentation.

After presenting we came up with a list to polish this piece:

Hide the projector
Make the frame 2 or 3 times bigger
Clean up the silhouette
Have a way to present all the videos maybe in another room

15 minutes – Video Sculpture

Earlier ads for television placed the tv as a main point of entertainment in the home. A safe place for the family to get together and enjoy their favorite shows. As time moved on, our desire to digest media didn’t change, but the device did shape, portability, and interact with us. Modern televisions record our voices, images, and data but remain disguised in fun entertainment.

How it works: The camera on the top is constantly recording the room. The feed is run through Isadora and output in two channels; the first feed is set to a 15-minute delay and rear-projected on the main screen – our thought is that in a gallery setting, a viewer would encounter footage of a previous viewer. The main screen cycles off to show an iPhone in the back of the casing live streaming the camera feed every two minutes.

One of the hardest parts of the physical construction was to find a material that could be used as a rear-projection screen. The balance between opaque and transparent was difficult to find.

Until we landed on a screen-printing screen that worked perfectly.

We experimented with multiple designs and tools to relay the image through Isadora back to the screens.

Project manager Sherry.

Custom rear-projection screen.

View from the front with rear-projection activated.

View from the front with rear-project off and the live feed activated on the phone.

View from the front with rear-projection activated.

View from the top with a projector in the back.

Final view.

Video Portrait

For this video portrait, we have decided to stroll down memory lane and make a portrait of television/technology and its role in our homes and lives.

Early televisions were seen as a point of pride and furniture in the homes, with whole rooms dedicated to it. Today the role of televisions has diminished in the house. Instead of dedicating a room around the device, they’re designed to be hidden. On top of that, our relationship to media has changed; we’re digesting more content across multiple devices that isn’t as precious as it once was. In fact, some of our videos today are designed to be destroyed after a short period of time instead of archived and held on to forever.

For the piece, we want to present our memory of TVs in their glory while referencing the new technology’s prominence. To achieve this, we will deconstruct an old television and build a diorama inside that closely resembles our memory of living rooms of the past. The television inside will be replaced with an iPhone that will be along the back wall. There will be three live channels feeding into the phone – the camera on the phone, a camera in front of the viewers, and a camera behind them. The three inputs will cycle. Below are a series of sketches, renders, and experiments in feed transitions.

Television Render:

Experiments with Channel transitions in Isadora: