Now that things are quieting down on campus, I have begun to build the Imaging Fox Point work from last summer.
Last summer my colleague Claire Andrade-Watkins and I produced groundwork in Providence, Rhode Island with the Cape Verdean community of Fox Point. We were following up on her internationally acclaimed documentary film “Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican?: A Cape Verdean American Story,” which tells the tragic and scandalous story of the displacement of this vibrant community of immigrants by urban renewal.
I’ve need to create a more dimensional interface for the Imaging Place work in Second Life. The problem was that I need links from Beijing to Sao Paulo. I have had the idea to simply use a globe for some time. I used data from the Visible Earth project.
As in earlier versions of Imaging Place, you can navigate to locations using the ENTER signs. You will need to see it up close, but I even got a thin cloud layer working.
“Imaging Place” was born of an attempt to apply the history and theory of photography to virtual reality. The project has roots stretching back to Mozi (470 BC to 390 BC), a Chinese philosopher credited with the discovery of the principles behind the pinhole camera which lead to the advent of the camera obscura by Iraqi scientist Abu Ali Al-Hasan (965-1039 AD) in Basra. Photography has always relied on the frame and the point of view. “Imaging Place” attempts to breakdown the frame, and the recipient determines the point of view, not the author. “Imaging Place” borrows from the traditions of documentary photography and filmmaking. However, it departs from those traditions by using nonlinear narrative structures and immersive tellepresence made possible by computer technologies and telecommunications networks. The result is still an image or representation, but now audience can enter, explore, have adventure in and ultimately participate in its making.
I am proposing expanding the “Imaging Place” project to focus on sites which have been given “In Danger” status by the UNESCO World Heritage program. Since my early work as a public artist, I have aspired to achieve political ends with my work. This might seem like a stretch in the game-like environments of virtual worlds. The same appeared to be the case in the early days of the World Wide Web, but few today would doubt the Web’s political potential. There is a sense of urgency with this project in that many of the sites where I am proposing to work are at risk. An example of that risk is the UNESCO World Heritage site, Buddhas of Bamiyan, which was destroyed by the Taliban 2001.
I have identified a handful of sites from the List of World Heritage in Danger, which are good candidates for getting the project started.
“Imaging Place” was designed to be scalable. When I produce work in a new location, I simply add it to the ever-expanding database and link the new location to the global interface. The project is in a perpetual state of becoming. It is cumulative and modular. Although the larger project will never be complete, individual modules can be added whenever and wherever it is produced. It was also designed to allow for the flexible migration to new forms as technology develops. This scaleable, modular and flexible design is why I have been able to sustain the project for eleven years.
I am currently running up against the limitations of Second Life as a platform and I aspire to develop my own open source virtual world. The final form will be a robust, stand-alone participatory social metaverse, where individuals from across the internet will gather to view the work, interact with one another and participate in the work through commenting, tagging and other social networking techniques. Ultimately users will be able to contribute to the expansion of the project.
I am looking into various options for low-level aerial photography in order to achieve avatar scale. I contacted Southern Balloonworks to ask some specific questions. I am trying to make vertical images only. So I don’t need pan, tilt or even viewfinder capabilities. I just need for the camera to point straight down and level. I asked if they had a system to do this? How large of a ball would I need to work with a standard SLR camera? What I would need to tether the unit? If the altitude is limited by anything other than the range of the remote? What is the highest they have operated one of their units? What the FAA restrictions are? And, they are working with GPS at all?
I found an afordable workable catadioptric solution for producing my own panovid nodes. This lens by 0-360 was under $600. It is built for still photography, but it works fine with HD video. The only people experimenting with catadioptric video are research scientist in CS and mathematics and in surveillance, which is huge but not suited to my needs. I processed the test image with a simple Polar Coordinate filter, which is common in Adobe products including AffterEffects. The resulting 1024×512 pixel equirectangular projection is exactly what is needed for the Imaging Place metaverse. This means that I can pack everything I need in a simple shoulder bag, no tripods etc. The workflow will be substantially streamlined, allowing me to work much faster and more spontaneously. I should be able to have functional nodes working almost as quick as they are produced, making realtime production a real possibility.
johncraigfreeman