Windscreen is an experimental, wind-driven physical interface, 2001.
Any physical scale habitable by the human body is also "inhabited" by massive levels of sensory data, equivalent to perhaps millions of analog-to-digital inputs a second. My response to learning about "physical computing" , was to look for alternative modes of sensing, other energetic or eloquent forces. After all, interactivity does have a long history of means- beyond computing, electronics or even electricity.
This experimental approach became an installation work that I am calling windscreen. Here, much technology was wilfuly discarded, and replaced with a single force - the wind
Wind has a checkered history in the arts, Kinetic art and wind-driven "yardart" being well known examples. In the "media arts', it has been intremittenty used, most often metaphorically. I wanted to use it as a sensor and actuator rolled into one.
In this work the “viewer” controls an almost physical image. His wind-shadow causes the movements in the frame, In an inexact way, since the wind-shadow is much less precise than a light shadow. Still the relationship is immediate enough to engage a person, which in turn causes the frame to drop in parts, and makes him visible to the rest of the audience. This is related to what happens in a video camera , and is also reminiscent of the numerous motion tracking, “body shadow” projects that are a familiar sight in media art.
The projected image is a slowly moving sequence of hard edged color washes that fade into black at every loop. I chose the colors of human races, ie. white black brown yellow red and blue (from the blue men!), because the user would get "painted" a certain color when the projection got through.