Elastic City Spacey: Stereoscopic 3D Video Projections, 2015 & 2018

Elastic City Spacey, 2015  

stereoscopic 3D video projection mapped onto an exterior building for a festival, Illuminate Bath (January 2015, England). 22 minute cycle.

This anaglyph video projection, shown projected onto the Roman Baths, is the first iteration in a series of projections that collages live video along with drawings of peacocks from Corsham Court at the Bath School of Art’s graduate campus, Roman coins (32 BC – 274 AD) excavated in the Beau Street Horde in 2007, and a 19C Indian painting of a figure riding a white peacock.

Elastic City Spacey continues the experiments in 3D stereoscopic projection I have been doing with S3D interactive video projections over a decade, this time using projection mapping onto a building, mixing the actual physical 3D of the building’s architecture with the 3D virtual drawing and 3D virtual sculpting.

The “elastic spacey” refers to the shifting sculptural shape of the work, through projection mapping responding to the building’s shape, as the projection moves. Within the space of the screen, I found ways to create virtual imaginative and fantastic spaces.

With stereoscopic 3D (S3D) art works, I find ways to bring the viewer into the frame, allowing them to walk into another world. Migration brings with it a doubled sense of place: S3D video spaces are elastic and dream-like places, ephemeral, yet capable of extending a sensation of volume, physicality, and presence to the viewer. The challenge of taking this 3D stereographic work into the ‘streets’ in Bath, to inhabit public dwelling spaces rather than a black box, allowed me to extend the art practice I have been developing, to further stretch the technology and the materials towards a new body of work.