I had this idea a couple of months ago and have been itching to try it out. The idea is simple, and once again plays on Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room, a work I’ve been referencing for what seems like years now. The text rather nicely explains the work.
I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
The key thing that interests me here is something to do with slow entropy and finding, or not being able to find, the point at which the “pixels” (or their equivalent) no longer form a representation of the original thing, and then what the remaining void means in itself. Slow entropy is fascinating wherever you find it, from the You Are Here point on a poster map where repeated touching has worn a hole to desire lines worn in grass verges that weren’t meant to be walked across.
But I digress. This current experiment is slightly different to the strict Lucier and I think it’s going to take a few goes to get right. The basic idea is to photograph a portion of a room and then project that photograph back, aligning it as closely as possible with the room. Then I take another photograph of the projection in the room and so on.
This has involved me investigating projection mapping, something all the cool digital artists are poking at, specifically the demo version of MadMapper which is fairly easy to use.
Anyway, here’s the first attempt, three photos starting with a clean shot and then two projections.
A failure, to be sure, but if we don’t record our failures… Next I think I’ll try something simpler.