Carnival Mirror - Performance 13th October 2007

Remember the silly mirrors in carnival funhouses? The ones that made your face look stretched? This piece is a variation of that kind of mirror. The program used, picks up the brightest spot in the audience and distorts it.

Project Overview

At first I got an inspiration from an interactive game, named Human Joysticks. I decided to make a game in processing and interact with a Nintendo Wii Remote. I started of by developing a game, which turned out to exceed my skills and I decided to change my concept a bit.

The inspiration for the actual piece came from those silly mirrors in carnival funhouses. I started experimenting with images in processing to see if I could get any effects on the background image. After I made the spot where the mouse went over distort on the image, I developed my code from an image to a life feed. I got the life feed (video camera) to work and when I moved the mouse, the spot where the mouse went over distorted. I had to find a way to interact with the life feed so thought it might look good to have everything dark in the performance and only light up the audiance, that would make the piece misterious and interesting. I tryed to find out how to track the brightest spot of the life feed in processing. At this stage I had the life feed, the trak for the brightest spot, the distort of the brightest spot of the life feed working, there was only one thing I wasn't happy with. I thought the camera tracked to many bright spots and made only a lot of small dots distorts. I needed help with finding out how to make bigger and more distorted ripples, after I got that I was very happy with my installation. I wanted it to distort slowly and softly, like the sound track I was going to use for the installion, MUM which is an Icelandic band. In the performance I had a LED headlight on my head, faceing the audiance. I also gave the audiance green Glow Sticks, so they would be able to control the ripples.

Final Processing Experiments

Experiments with the processing code

Tracking the brightest spot

I decided to use glow sticks along with the LED headlight, to track the brightest spot in the crowd.

Carnival Mirror - Presentation_slides

'Crazy Mirror' makes your iSight (more) fun

I found this great program for a Crazy Mirror, which is just like the performance programs in the new Mac Book Pro computers!



Remember those silly mirrors that you used to find inside those goofy fun-house carnival rides? The ones that gave you the figure of Grimace or a stretched-out face? Now, you can re-live those carnival mirror glory days with Crazy Mirror, the latest piece of Mac freeware from Tatsuo Unemi. The program boasts a number of distortion effects to make you look, well--crazy! You can record Quicktimes of your craziness, as well. If you have kids, they'll eat this up. And it's a universal binary, so it will run great on your new Intel-based Mac.

Download the Crazy Mirror program!