lumiskin : luminous responsive enclosures

an installation by Alex Haw (atmos) and Mauritius Seeeger (dr.mo)

Surveillance dissuades action; it seeks to prevent, rather than prompt, activity; it judges and mitigates. Similarly, projections predominantly preclude activity, encouraging passive absorption rather than active participation by their audience. Lumiskin uses projections to create an amorphous, reactive architecture, delicately enshrouding visitors, responding to their every move, dancing with them as they move through its ether. It spatialises surveillance tracking technologies in an exploration of ‘ambiveillance’ – the twin sides of surveillance that both empower and entrap its subjects. It both ensnares and aggrandises its visitors, who drift into a light mist and accrue luminous spatial fragments – a generative architecture constantly reforming its space around the occupants. lumiskin combines camera-vision, computation and tracking systems with projectors to explore the way people behave when tracked, and to visualise the kind of spaces their behaviour creates. In contrast to much interactive work, it creates spaces rather than drawings – and enables a complex web of inter-personal relations.

Cameras co-located adjacent to projectors scan the scene and detect movement. Custom software inscribes an enclosure around the moving body, feeding it to the projector , whose luminous emissions of points and lines stretch into vectors and surfaces as they move through the light fog, conjuring an ever-shifting series of territories around the visitors. The software can recalibrate the degree of enclosure, inscribing a tight envelope around its subject, or a range of looser boundaries that enlarge the visible perceptual space within each dynamic skin. Perforated dashed-line outlines create porous walls whilst thick edges create deep and solid luminous surfaces – the visitor can toggle their degree of solidity and opacity to their living skin.

Lumiskin was exhibited at ISEA09 (Belfast) in August 2009. Software developed using openframeworks.