2013 | Interactive Installation
The Autonomous Video Hut at the 2013 Lucidity Festival in Santa Barbara was a solar powered structure and a series of interactive video art installations headed by Ethan Turpin and Alan Macy. Part of the intent was to create a cycle where the day's sunlight is collected and the energy is beamed back out at night in the form of video art. Kyle Ruddick and I developed a piece for the system using Kinect, Ryan Challinor's Synapse, Quartz Composer and Ableton Live. It was fun watching people interact with and add to the piece. The hut also featured various combinations of video feedback and analog geometric objects such as a large wooden mirror-lined kaleidoscope with colored lights which often combined to create interesting results. The piece I felt was the heart of the hut was Ethan's Video Feedbackteria, where video feedback of a moire pattern caused by the intersecting planes of the video camera and projector creating an interactive rotating piece that people could 'paint' on with illuminated objects (cell phones worked really well) and erase the image by blocking the projection and selectively stopping the feedback. When left alone, the feedback would resemble cell growth and patterns found in nature. More on Video Feedbackteria here. Like so many of the installations, locations and events at Lucidity, people wandering up to the structure were encouraged to participate and emergent performance pieces were created. The projections and interactions existed both inside and outside of the structure and the material of the screen walls could be pushed on creating yet another dimension of interactivity. Above is a short video I stitched together using the small bits of footage I caught with my phone at various points in the evening.