VART3490 - Installation Art :: "Site Assessment"

RMIT SCHOOL OF ART

Installation Art
Semester Two 2014

Installation Art

In the light of the issues sighted in the introduction to
SPACES FOR INSTALLATION
consider this starting point; an objective of a personal space.

PROJECT ONE: A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

. Under take a detailed objective examination of your bedroom / space.
. The research should include the following (as in a forensic report): the dimensions of    the room, the orientation of the room as to the rest of the building, contents of the room, the location of the contents, architectural details of the room.

. Make a series of schematic drawings of the room: plan view, side elevation etc.
. Use further drawings and photography to visually document the room and its contents.

. What are some of the sensory aspects and functions of the room, e.g. sounds, smells, textures, activities etc.

. Once you have exhausted the objective analysis of the room list some subjective responses to/ of the space.

. Through these lists, drawings, photographs etc, make a simple scale model of the room, schematically blocking in the main forms (furniture etc).

. With all this information consider translating the room’s existence into another place i.e. the Life Room. Think of this process as ‘ performing the room’ for the rest of the group.

. This could start out with you physically marking out the plan dimensions of your room with masking tape or some other material, and you as a guide to activate the bedroom’s identity. Installation as a Live Art event.

. Work will another person to document the ‘performative installation’ Photography? Video? Duration: 10 minutes.

Slitscan Photography

Originally used in static photography to achieve blurriness or deformity, the slit-scan technique was perfected for the creation of spectacular animations. It enables the cinematographer to create a psychedelic flow of colors. Though this type of effect is now often created through computer animation, slit-scan is a mechanical technique. It was adapted for film by Douglas Trumbull during the production of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and used extensively in the "star child" sequence. It requires an imposing machine, capable of moving the camera and its support. This type of effect was revived in other productions, for films and television alike. For instance, slit-scan was used by Bernard Lodge to create the Doctor Who title sequences for Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker used between December 1973 and January 1980. Slit-scan was also used in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994) to create the "stretching" of the starship Enterprise-D when it engaged warp drive. Due to the expense and difficulty of this technique, the same three warp-entry shots, all created by Industrial Light and Magic for the series pilot, were reused throughout the series virtually every time the ship went into warp.


Slitscan Video

You can make your own slit camera out of any video capable digital camera with a regular sensor and a regular lens. All you need to do is the following:

1. record a video of your action
2. extract each frame as an individual image (the opposite to what you would do for a time lapse)
3. extract a vertical single pixel wide line from each image (for example a line from the center)
4. stack those lines horizontally from left to right to form an actual "slit scan" image

This can be automated by tools like e.g. ImageMagick and the longer your initial video was, the wider your image will be. In fact, the width of your slit scan image will have exactly the same amount of pixels as your initial video's frame number.

Now, to go one step further you can proceed for all the other vertical lines of your images and create one slit scan image for each particular set of vertical lines. This will give you a set of as many slit scan images as your initial video was wide in pixels. Combining that set of slit scan images to a video (this time exactly as in a time lapse) your result can look like this.

Important note:

I decided to abandon the slitscan method in order to focus on sound as the primary medium for this work. Delving into the slitscan technique is too tangental to be practical for my development as a sound artist. I chose instead to use this assignment to focus on developing audio capture skills and multimedia electronics which have been the focus of my installation work in the past.