BDF Screen Machine

Developed for the Brighton Digital Festival - OUR MACHINES exhibition at the University of Brighton, Edward Street building 2nd floor gallery space, ‘Screen Machine’ offered public audience participants the opportunity to co-create chance encounters and self direct spontaneous performances between two separate installation locations. These unique transitory events relied entirely on the roles and performances the participants brought to these telepresent screens and the experiences they choose to live out. Inspired by our urban and cultural surroundings and re-contextualized in a diverse array of digital milieus, ‘Screen Machine’ aimed to allow these public audiences the agency and control over the outcomes of this intervention, akin to a telepresent fluxus happening. The installation took live oblique camera shots from above the screens of two separate audience groups located in the Edward Street building 2nd floor gallery situated on green screen backdrops. Linked via a live video connection the audiences were brought together on screen using a system of chroma-key video mixers. As the merged audiences started to explore this collaborative, shared telepresent space they discovered the ground beneath them, as it appeared on screen, located them in a world of surprising and intriguing anamorphic environments. These digital backgrounds directly referenced our social and cultural setting in a ludic virtual world. This installation adopted a playful and open approach to public video screens to manifest a truly interactive peoples screen. Inspired in part by 3D anamorphic street art and computer games, the motivation behind this proposal also came from the historic films of Lumière contemporaries Mitchell and Kenyon, whose films of Edwardian public crowds in the 1900’s presented a striking similarity to the way audiences react and respond in Sermon and Gould’s telematic urban screen interventions.