Illuminate
Illuminate allows you to paint on live video with real light. Whooooooa? Here me out… LAPP, or Light Art Performance Photography has been very popular recently. And it’s fun as heck! If you don’t know what I’m talking about check out these:
- http://archesign.com/?p=76
- http://xspblog.wordpress.com/2009/05/20/light-art-performance-photography-lapp/
- http://nebuto.com/2009/09/02/lichtkunst-auf-hohen-niveau/
But as beautiful as these works all are, I have always been irritated by the fact that you cannot capture the enormous F.U.N. people have making them. So I decided to step it up a notch and transfer the whole thing to video. It’s a Max / Jitter Patch that simply doesn’t refresh pixels that are over a certain luminance threshold. It’s designed to be a public installation on parties and events for everyone to enjoy and take home a screenshot or two. The videos should give you an idea.
As mentioned in the video, you can adjust the alpha mask to the environment. This means that you can determine how high the contrast between the refreshed pixels and the memorized ones is. In fact you can even adjust the contrast with respect to red, green and blue. So, if there’s a background with a lot of bright green that would stay on the screen, you can alleviate by adjusting the mask.
It’s also fun to use different colors on the iPhone or even drawing patterns.
It even works with stencils. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good screen capture of stenciling yet, but at least some snaps!
Currently this project is a work in progress. The idea is to end up with an installation for the public to enjoy. You should be able to draw an image on a good old overhead projector by hand and then trace the image with light. For better understanding see the schematic below. I’ll update this post as soon as I catch a break between all my projects.
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