The Arriflex 16 ST body with UV-light source and motorized zoom lens
Julius von Bismarck and Andreas Schmelas have just open sourced the code of their collaboration project “The Space beyond me”. The project includes an “Apparatus for reviving spaces that are captured in celluloid” and was exhibited at the Transmediale 2010 (Berlin) and several other festivals (right now it can be seen at the Ghent Film Festival in Belgium). The installation is able to construct a representation from celluloid film combining a modified 16mm camera with a UV-light projector. The device projects a film whilst moving in exactly the same way in which the camera operator moved the camera while shooting the film.
What happens, if a projector moves while it is projecting in exactly the same way in which the camera moved that recorded the film, which is now being projected? What happens, is similar to processes happening in the brain when we perceive our surroundings. Virtual rooms or landscapes are composed from flat visual information, constructing a subjective representation of the world.
The projector is placed centrally in a round room, the walls of which are painted with phosphorescent paint. The paint emits an afterglow of the image projected onto it, so that the moving camera-projector keeps adding to the image. After the film has played, all scenes of the film are reproduced in their correct location. The film, which originally recorded a spatial setting, has been translated from a time-based medium back into a space.
The software for the installation (available to download here) consists of several parts and including a openframeworks scene arrangement application, arduino sourcecode and a processing app (responsible for parsing the output of the openframeworks into a arduino compatible progmem format array). The openframeworks part includes an application for extracting “camera movement” out of a video and an application for arranging “scenes” onto a virtual stage.
Project pages juliusvonbismarck.com | andreas-schmelas.de
