Accessible site-specific installation with interactive projection
commissioned by Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (NL) for next gen art event, exhibition "new horizons"
Passage Park #2: The Container is a site-specific installation, which the visitors can move freely in. The accessible scenery consists of a cargo container standing in a landscape of rocks, trees, shrubbery, and fern. The entire set is composed and rendered in various 3D programs. The printed parts were then mounted on the wooden container walls, the back wall, the floor and on the contour-cut free-standing props. The individual parts of the scenery form a path along the side of the container leading towards the backdrop image horizon. The container can be entered from within the installation through an opening shaped like a cave.
The container itself is a dark projection space for an interactive projection, a further development of Passage Park #1. Several plants and objects, such as the container, appear both in the projection and in the printed set. As opposed to the landscape objects, which suggest the view of a continuous terrain, the objects shown in the projection strangely defy the laws of physics. They seem to be hovering on various levels, intersect, and vary unproportionally in their dimensions.
Passage Park consists of several different interactive scenes. They are linked through a common interface but can be displayed independently.
The moving images of the scenes are not retrieved from a DVD player or a media server, but rendered on a PC computer. This results in scenes that are not mere video recordings, instead they are 3D realtime images, which are not limited in time, and have a programmed camera behaviour and user interaction we write individually for each scene.
Photographs and objects are selected from a stock and placed in the scene at random. These objects are placed on different levels and may overlap and/or intersect. We don't want to create an arrangement of objects that could be found in reality but a mixture that induces an atmosphere of the viewer passing by surrealistic spatial situations.
While the first person camera is moving automatically through the 3D objects and photos, the vistor can use the mouse to look around.
Clicking the mouse will change the light situation: Without pressing the mouse button the user will see just what lies directly in front of them within the narrow beam of a searchlight; when the mouse button is held down the scenery is openly displayed in a bright, vivid ambient light.
The photographs however, which formed the contours of the location characteristics in the dark scene, vanish in the bright light, leaving nothing but a random composed combination of scattered 3D objects.