Hypothetical Piece
My idea for a hypothetical project I would like to produce is centered around creating a large scale motion picture montage. By this I mean creating the video equivalent of a photo montage where a single image is composed from thousands of various smaller images that act as pixels.
1600 television screens would be stacked on top of each other in a grid-like arrangement of 400 high by 400 wide, that from standing right up close, would look like a wall of tv’s just arbitrarily playing different pieces of footage in no particular sequence. However once the viewer takes a step back they begin to see a much larger image emerge from the monitors and realise that they are watching an entirely different video altogether.
In order to for this piece to be successful, enough footage must be collected to be used as pixels, and so around 4000 video cameras would be handed out randomly to people of the public who are free to go and film anything that catches their interest, anything at all.
After doing so they must return a copy of all the footage they obtained, and the incentive for doing so is that they get to keep the camera.
The collected footage would then be fed through a series of complex computer algorithms that ‘read’ the colour and light levels for every frame within each scene and label them with an appropriate colour approximation that will be used to determine which monitor it is displayed on and at what time so as to correspond to the ‘bigger picture’ that is the giant video.
The giant video itself would be a visual documentation of some (or all) of the 200 people as they go around filming for themselves, i.e, a film of them as they are filming their own footage that is something completely seperate.
So at the end of the day, the work is depicting a community of people filming a video, and the work is made up of what they have filmed, what they saw.
Of course while this project would be incredibly complicated and costly to produce in terms of both time and money, if resources were really no object, and all the time and money was available, I believe it would be very much possible to accomplish.
-Alex M
October 6th, 2009 at 7:27 am
Alex that is crazy! Remind me to talk to you about the i500 work ccurrently being finished off in the new Chemistry centre