Projected in the Rialto Santambrogio in Rome. The Rialto had just done a renovation and the vaulted ceiling in the main room was restored to it’s previous height. I had just visited the Sistine Chapel and was blown away by Michelangelo’s work. When Fabio Compagna, curator and friend, showed me the space I couldn’t help but do a new twist in the ‘The Creation of Adam’ from the Sistine. So as you see, you send a text message to the number displayed and it appears in Adam’s speech bubble. It’s all automatic and unfiltered.
It was Halloween and time for TXT of the Living Dead to hit the streets of the US, why not start in Brooklyn. It works by sending the next line of dialogue in the form of a text message and it trips the movie to play forward dropping you message into the next speech frame.
After giving a talk at the Kelly Writer’s House at the University of Pennsylvania I went out and put up a projection on the Penn Campus. Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. Special thanks to Jessica Lowenthal and Steve McLaughlin.
All photos from the Penn sessions below by Steve McLaughlin
Hitting Paris while finishing up a run of projecting in France with the support of Le Ferme Du Buisson and invited to France by Régine Debatty . Thanks!
This was the first public showing of the interactive movie. Send the next line of dialogue in the form of a text message and it trips the movie to play forward dropping you message into the next speech frame.
Looking for help translating… go here. SO now if you have translated or already know french you may be curious to know why some of the dialog is about jaccuzi’s, it’s because everyone was sitting in these giant wood fired hot tubs. Now that’s a nice way to do things.
Huge thanks to John Bourbon, his crew, La Ferme Du Buisson and especially Mathieu & Fabrice for hospitality and kindness. The week was tough, with a transit strike and then a couple suburban hooligans trying to steal my laptop mid-show. They left the projector smashed, and my computer received a nice dent, but the show went on.
In these suburbs of France the streets were empty after 8 pm. Nothing happening in the streets, no cafes, no nothing. I projected the bubbles up with the help of Mathieu and Fabrice. People from the building I was hitting all hung their heads or came down to play. In the end they said that they were really thankful to have something like this to be a part of. This made up for all the mishaps of this trip.
Participating in Nuit Blanche with the Infinite Exchange Gallery I put the bubbles up in the Kensington Market area of Toronto. I decided to use the jungle gym boy so that the sent messages became his. Eyes closed and a pleasent smile the jungle gym boy steals your messages and makes tham his for the audience in the street to judge the creativity behind what you sent.
While in Canada the US Dollar dropped below the Canadian Dollar. Who’s owning who now.
Thanks to: Jennifer Delos Reyes, Lori Gordon, Brette Gabel, and Stacey O’conner.
Invited by the Berlin based art/video group Director’s Lounge. The weather was unseasonably cold and rainy the whole week almost turned out to be a bust. On the night I was to fly out Katrin came out of nowhere with her little car and we put up the speech bubbles. Protected by the hatch back we projected through the rain and cold. The lounge/bar across the street offered a wall of glass windows that looked out aross the street allowing the pleasent people inside to participate.
September 1st, 2007 by admin | Posted in Brooklyn | Comments Off
Rewrite films over and over again.
For this project I used the classic horror flick by George C. Romero, Night of the Living Dead, and made it dynamic by allowing participants to text message in the next lines int he movie. I turned it into TXT of the Living Dead. Any movie can be treated this way, it’s just that NOTLD is in public domain.
How it works:
I took the original movie (any film works) and broke it out into 500 frames to visually tell the original story from beginning to end. Within those frames there are about 114 frames with speech bubbles. Text messages sent in from participants show up in those frames in the order that they are received. When a message is received the movie is tripped to play forward. The other 380 or so frames are action frames that play through automatically until they hit a speech frame. Once all the speech frames have been filled the movie can then be viewed from beginning to end with the new audience generated dialogue.
A little experiment in spontaneous projecting. L.a.s.e.r. Tag, Bugs, Drip TXT and Speech Bubbles take over the corner of Smith and Douglass Sts. in Brooklyn. The cops arrived and assessed the situation, and gave peaceful assembly and free speech a curfue of 11 pm. Participants included Graffiti Research Lab (Laser Tag), Chris Sugrue (the crazy cool bugs you see under the speech bubbles), and Adam Chapman (co-creator of Drip TXT). Special thanks to Seth Prouty for his van, generators, and being a lovely person.
