the anti experience of Ed

Exhibited at the Machinista 2004 Festival in Glasgow in May of 2004.

The “Trails” series of software based installation works that utilize a webcam and specially created software using video capture and 3D graphics programming techniques. These works take video data from the webcam and map it out over three dimensions: the first two dimensions being the image coming out of the webcam frame by frame, and the third being time.

It was my aim to visualize the temporal strangeness between human and network. In synchronous social environments online, such as chat room conversations, our presence is defined by how we interact with the system; for example, in a chat room typed words define our sense of place and identity.

However, we can also see and experience what we have said previously by simply reading the scrollback in a way that we cannot in the offline world. But time inexorably moves forward online just as it does offline, and eventually the trails of conversation that we left behind fade away into the networked ether.

This software uses a camera to capture the viewer’s presence and visualizes this effect.

The visual output of the piece is an on screen 3D structure made up of layers of virtual “screens.” These screens are built out of a matrix of cubes. Each layer of the structure represents a different moment in time. On one side of the structure the most recent frame from the camera is rerepresented. Each of the subsequent layers are the frames preceding this most immediate data, laid out sequentially back in time.

The resulting effect is of the viewer creating semi persistent “Trails” as he or she moves in front of the webcam. As the onscreen structure rotates and different visual perspectives are offered, the viewer experiences different notions of abstracted visual presence through the mediated eye of the machine and exaggeratedly visualized time.