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Cavallerizza Digitale
Fabian Winkler
Cavallerizza Digitale is a site-specific installation that consists
of an interactive virtual 3-D environment, which changes its appearance in
response to the movement of visitors in physical space. A realistically
rendered baroque façade is deconstructed and transformed into a completely
abstract architectural space which consists only of the bounding boxes of
the original baroque details. The computer-generated façade is a
reconstruction of the baroque façade in the exhibition space: the
Cavallerizza Reale in Torino, Italy.
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Concept
I created this installation as a response to Michael Heim's paper
"Virtual Realism" which investigates the increasingly polarized
spectrum of attitudes toward virtualization, from network idealist on the
one side to neo-Luddite critics on the other. Proposing a middle way, Heim
discusses strategies for balancing total immersion in Virtual Reality
spaces with a deeper rooting and understanding of the body in the physical
world. Virtual Realism suggest, that this balance, reinforced by design
considerations in the creation of virtual worlds will lead to more
meaningful experiences in virtual reality.
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My installation Cavallerizza Digitale allows visitors to change the
virtual representation of Cavallerizza Reale's baroque façade by
physically moving in the actual architectural space. The audience
deconstructs parts of the virtual architecture by walking in corresponding
areas in front of the real faŤade. In this process, rich ornamental details
of the baroque architecture are morphed into their most reduced
representations, bounding boxes. In the context of Heim's theory,
Cavallerizza Digitale poses interesting questions: When does a
computer-simulated space become abstract? How does the process of navigating
this abstract space change if the space becomes more abstract the more it is
being explored? Does this technique allow us to read abstracted space in
more meaningful ways? What new and unexplored features of the real
architecture does the flexible virtual architecture reveal?
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Technical Details
A camera attached to the Cavallerizza's royal balcony records the movements
of the visitors in an area of 7mx7m. The signal is sent through a BNC cable
to a Macintosh computer with a video digitizer. The motion tracking software
"Big Eyes" interprets the video stream and detects changing parts
in the video image (i.e. movements of visitors). These movements
generate - depending on their x/y location in the image - different MIDI
signals. The MIDI signals are sent to a custom Java3D software running on
a PC. The software manipulates the computer generated architectural details
according to the MIDI signals. Finally, the high resolution output of the
custom Java3D software is projected onto a rear-projection screen located
on the royal balcony.
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Exhibitions
- BIG Torino, Biennale Internazionale Arte Giovane (International
Biennial of Emergent Art), Turin, Italy, Apr. - May 2000
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