Visual Echo @ Center For Architecture
Monday, January 15th, 2007
The theme of sensing visitors’ presence and colors is a topic a number of ITP projects touch on. The scale of it is visually interesting, but the response left us a bit disappointed. It wasn’t clear at first where you had to position yourself for the installation to react to your presence. We eventually saw the iSight, and even waved Tikva’s red jacket in front of it, but still the color shift was really subtle, and the faint pink hue slowly traveled up through the rest of the LED tiles.
But it made me think about why these types of pieces are still fascinating - we like to affect changes in our environment, and people are drawn to visually responsive/mirror like pieces. We like gadgets and technologies that DO things for us, respond to our touch, get info for us, tell us where we are, show a trace of where we’ve been… Danny Rozin’s mirrors and similar camera sensing/abstract mirroring projects are so appealing, I think, because you see yourself in another form, you affect change in this particular piece, and for a moment you are the main focus and actor in this piece. You actively become part of the project itself. What was missing from this installation seemed to be how limited where you had to be in order to become part of this experience. It would’ve been more fun to see how my colors could meet/mesh/clash with someone else’s and what that could imply. But maybe it just wasn’t working properly when we visited, since these Gothamist pics depict an entirely different experience.