DyingtoLiveAgainisaninteractiveaudiovisualinstallationthatusesmotioncaptureto explore the ambiguity between presence and absence. Participants are shown a virtual graveyard where their movement is represented in real-time as a ghostly figure. The movements of recent participants can be revealed whenever the current participant’s ghost touches a virtual tombstone. Living animals are shown in the graveyard to evoke the concept of a liminalspacebetween life and death, inviting participants to relate these concepts of ‘in-betweenity’ to new forms of partial presence. The finished project was developed in Unity and uses data from a Kinect v2 sensor for input. There are two main parts of our project that we hope the participant is able to observe: the present and the past. The present is a straightforward process of showing the participant a reflection of themselves. The second part, the past, enables the participant to view previous actions. The finished product explores the aesthetics of ambiguity in relation to past actions—whether they are from the participant or predetermined. The technical process we used to achieve this involved storing the coordinates of the user’s motions in a text file, and later reading it in real-time.
Lex Moakler, Kemdi Ikejiani, Zhouyang Lu, Anas Chohan