I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
John Lennon, lyrics in The Beatles song “I am the Walrus”.

Inspired by John Lennon’s song, we have been working in a series of “magic mirrors” where the interactor reflection is substituted, frame- by-frame, for a different, previously stored, interactor in the same position.

In Walrus2, we restraint the mirror so that it only captures and reflects the interactor face. The system, for every frame, captures and stores the user’s face and displays another user face instead. Walrus2 creates and manages a database of faces where each frame is catalogued according to its three-dimensional rotation, and some gesture descriptors. This depiction of the stored faces allow for the substitution so that, every frame, the user is reflected with a face corresponding to a different person.

The installation reflects on several topics, namely self-perception, artistic exhibition, surveillance, control, and public entertainment.

Walrus2 effectively creates a sense of awe that arising from the fact that even the facial features in the mirror are completely different to the interactor’s the identification with the displayed image is natural and immediate.

Walrus2 from krahd on Vimeo.

Walrus2 is composed of a Microsoft Kinect Sensor, a computer, a projector and an oval-shaped picture frame. We configure these components to maximize both the capturing accuracy (Kinect) and display quality (projector + display).

We utilise the sensor to track the interactor’s head, and Microsoft’s Face Tracker to locate the face and extract some gestural features: mouth openness, rising of eyebrows, mouth shape, etc.

The computer stores each new face and its associated data into a database, and returns an existing one from the database. We organise the database as a hash table, with similar faces stored under the same hash entries. We define the face similarity by an L∞ norm of the head rotation, plus similar gestural features.

When a new face is entered, it is put into the entry of the hash entry with most similar poses. To avoid running out of storage, we cap a maximum size of each hash entry, and randomly kick out an existing entry when the limit is reached. We then randomly pick another face from the same hash entry. This can be considered as a cheap way of finding similar faces to the input through hashing.

The projector is mounted either on the ceiling or on top of a tripod that allows the returned face to be projected onto the oval picture frame without the interactor casting a shadow onto it.

The “bubbles” were coded in Processing and map water like bubbles that came out from tracked bodies, while the rest of the design was done in an image editing software.

This time, We created HOMO, an audiovisual performance that combines video-mapping onto mannequins with realtime music and live cinema.

HOMO was created by

• Tomas Laurenzo
• Christian Clark
• Guillermo Berta
• Germán Hoffman
• Tatjana Kudinova

Proper video documentation was performed by the School’s press team and will be, hopefully, soon given to us :)

Here are some videos we found online:

And here are some pictures:

It is now been shown in Montevideo, as you can see here:

Here’s a small documentation of our first test.
More to come.
Sometime in the future.

Prince of San Francisco // test 1 from krahd on Vimeo.

NET is an audiovisual performance done for the Engineering School’s “Ingeniería deMuestra 2011″ festival. (Universidad de la República, Uruguay).

We used a custon instrument (namely, a YARMI), some traditional instruments (guitars, synths, keyboards), three semi-transparent projection screens, and two projectors.

Personnel:

Tomás Laurenzo: concept, art direction, visuals, music, music playing (guitar, YARMI). Christian Clark: music direction, music playing (guitar). Guillermo Berta: music playing (many synths, keyboards, computer). Gustavo Armagno: visuals playing. Diego Rebella: cartón operator. Sofía Sienra: filming.

NET from krahd on Vimeo.

Son is a small installation we created for Techne, an art event hosted by the National Museum of Visual Arts, in Montevideo, Uruguay.

We used a Kinect for tracking, and coded the visuals in Processing. The audio was created using Reaktor.

• Tomás Laurenzo (art direction, coding).
• Christian Clark (coding, visuals)
• Pablo Gindel (coding, sound)
]]> http://laurenzo.net/blog/son/feed 0 http://laurenzo.net/blog/celebra http://laurenzo.net/blog/celebra#comments Tue, 26 Jun 2012 16:08:17 +0000 tom http://laurenzo.net/?p=391 Celebra is an interactive installation comprising a network of two-hundred, one-square-meter led-lit balloons. The installation interacts both with the local audience –sensing their movements and sounds– and with remote public, through a web site that streams a video with sound of the installation in real-time, and allows its users to interact with the piece. Celebra can also play music (usually our music, specifically composed for it), and visually reacts to it.

As participants approach the piece, the balloons react to the music it plays, to the movements of the participants, and to the sound they produce. The color of each balloon can be controlled individually, so the whole network of balloons may act as a deconstructed screen, or a balloon or group of balloons can react to some specific participants.

The baloons are lit using RGB LEDs, and the network is wired. We develoepd a client-server architecture where one master server controls the balloons and blends the stimuli of a host of clients (both remote and local) that send commands to the installation.

It was programmed using openframeworks and processing, custom electronics, and octobars.

By bondi:

• Tomás Laurenzo (idea + art direction + coding)
• Christian Clark (production + direction + coding)
• Fabrizio Devoto (architect + chef)
• Pablo Gindel (electronics guru + overall inspiration)

Celebra from krahd on Vimeo.

]]> http://laurenzo.net/blog/celebra/feed 0 http://laurenzo.net/blog/updating-this-site%e2%80%a6 http://laurenzo.net/blog/updating-this-site%e2%80%a6#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:52:05 +0000 tom http://laurenzo.net/?p=387 http://laurenzo.net/blog/updating-this-site%e2%80%a6/feed 0 http://laurenzo.net/blog/video-for-patio http://laurenzo.net/blog/video-for-patio#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:00:50 +0000 tom http://laurenzo.net/?p=374 For our friends at the Architecture School of the UDELAR we (Christian Clark and I) created a little video, showcasing the success of their online magazine “Patio”:

Patio 1 año from Facultad de Arquitectura-UDELAR on Vimeo.

We created a little particle system in Processing and composed it with a NLE. All the backgrounds were also created using the NLE

]]> http://laurenzo.net/blog/video-for-patio/feed 0