Bryan Chung

This is a new artwork on writing and motion detection proposed for the exhibition in Hong Kong Museum of Art in May 2008. Ellen Pau is the curator. This work is part of the Writing Machine Collective organized by Linda Lai.

Synopsis
It is a writing machine. A machine writes by itself automatically. Writing in usual sense, aims to establish its authority by being non-volatile. Around ten years ago, I had a short chat with the Chinese artist Song Dong about his performative ‘writing’ exercises. He had been writing with brush and water on rice paper for many years. No visible marks can be found now. Only a pile of wrinkle paper left after the water stain dried.

From time to time, we enjoy writing on the sand during our visits to the beach. Children may even build sand castles which by no means stand the tear and wear of wind and tidal wave. Writing on sand can be a possible way to trigger reflection about volatility of recording and archive.

Digital media, according to what we learnt, demonstrates this volatile nature. In this project, I plan to make a simple machine that writes or draws a pile of sand. The visible marks on the sand will not be legible but just records of what has been happening in the exhibition venue. Over the days of the show, it forms a historical archive of the visitors’ movement around the exhibit.

Design details
Regarding the input to the installation, the motion based interactivity comes to my mind. With the proliferation of motion detection based interaction design, we can find numerous sites in shopping malls, MTR, art galleries, employing the techniques to market the products or the artists themselves. Although a number of artists or designers claim to ‘play’ with the technology, the outcomes are rather disappointing. Most of them are pure technical implementation of an existing infra-structure, with exchangeable content and stripped bare with any specific context.

The project combines the act of writing as records and a parody of the above mentioned motion detection/tracking interactivity. It will be an artwork produced for exhibition in a gallery space with intended interaction from the visitors. It has no content in the traditional sense. Motion detection usually bases on a stationary camera, pointing to a relatively static background. Changes in front of the camera are compared with previous video frames. Motion is estimated by the various statistical or artificial intelligent computations. This installation purposely violates the above assumption and aims to set off an experiment with results yet to be predicted.

A small camera hangs from the ceiling through a piece of wire. Under the camera is a thin ‘brush’ which is long enough to touch the floor. Covering a small area of the floor is a pile of sand. A motor in the ceiling can swing the camera together with the brush in rotating motion. The camera is setup to track the visitors’ motion in the exhibition space. Visitors’ movement is tracked and feedback to the computer system which drives the motor to rotate aligning with the direction of movement. Nevertheless, the swinging movement of the camera is complicated in an analog fashion that, by nature, cannot be exact as digital control. This feedback loop will re-iterate in a recursive manner. To further complicate the issue, a small LED light hangs behind the camera onto the same motor. It casts a shadow of the moving camera on the surrounding, which can be the walls or visitors’ body. This moving shadow will also be a target of tracking. That is the camera tracks itself – its own shadow. Any visitors entering the venue may disrupt the equilibrium and set off a seemingly chaotic movement. And that movement will again be recorded by the brush scratching on the pile of sand.

A video recording of the testing activities.