Chalk Vision was born out of performance collaboration with physical theatre performer Athena Mazarakis. This particular Chalk Vision program grew out of a motion detection patch written in Max/MSP Jitter.
What Chalk Vision does is only detect motion and represents that motion as an image of white chalk dust on a black ground. Chalk Vision became Chalk Vision Project because I explored various iterations and presentation of the same program.
Chalk Vision as Film in a small experimental movie that explores the relationship between motion and what is hidden. For instance, there are two people in the film all the time, but because of the motion filter we only become aware of the 2nd player much later on. Or when the 1st player walks behind the 2nd and therefore leaves reveals their “shadow” form.
Chalk Vision Installation is when I created two separate interactive installations, allowing an audience to interact with a live feed. Both were for the 2008 Spier Contemporary.
Still captures of motion from Cape Town Chalk Vision installation.
In Cape Town the projection was on a large black canvas amongst the painting, what was projected on this was the “chalk markings” of the ever changing motion of performers and audience members in the performance space next door.
In the Johannesburg Art Gallery I moved the installation into the stone staircase connecting two exhibition spaces above and below ground. The canvas in this case became the “chalk markings” of visitors moving up an down the stairs in real time. A play not only on Duchamp’s futurist “Nude Descending the Staircase”, but also references an interactive video work by David Rokeby titled “Cheap Imitation”
Chalk Vision Two won a First Merit Spier Contemporary Prize and was shown again at the MEANING MOTION exhibition at Wits Art Museum in 2013, and is also referances in the book Interactive Art and Embodiment by Nathaniel Stern.
Chalk Vision One from Tegan Bristow on Vimeo.