Thursday, October 28, 2010

Video Projection Box

I finally did it! After much fretting and late-night research, last evening I caved and bought myself a pico projector. I went with the Samsung SP-H03 pocket projector, as it is smaller than my hand... (really, I swear!), LED-powered, and one can just plug in a flash drive to show a movie. Very exciting, as I wanted something to easily hide and disguise inside the accordion box.

So I am very happy to say that it fits right in- I can perch it on the ledge of the box, and the movie shows up very well in regular fluorescent room lighting. I plan to have it in a fairly dark area, possibly cloaked by some old velvet drapery (if I can get my hands on that). The projection is actually on top of a partially etched zinc plate, on which I hoped would give a strange luminous and reflective quality. It certainly does, although at some angles one just gets the bright spot of the LED light reflecting straight back in the face, so I will have to mess with positioning, although somehow I do really like it all just resting right on the ground. I think it goes along with the viewer having to huddle down toward the chair to pick up the phone receiver.

Perhaps I should explain the video a bit. When I was trying to edit it into this sort of narrative montage, it just wasn't working. So I thought about what it really was that I wished to capture, and it was simply a series of actions of making, pulling out, and creating- all sort of magical ways of bringing forth an image and looking, and processing- all mostly with traditional, analog reproduction equipment, such as typewriters, copy cameras, and etching presses. They have a sort of magical draw for me- as if always opening this strange, musty old velvet-lined box and waiting to see what appears inside.

What I decided to do instead was put black space, fade-in's and out's as pauses between each action so that they were separate- almost like a moving slideshow. I added a soundtrack of the trains and the crickets- that sort of strange white noise one hears in the woods, kind of mournful, and longing for a place to return to. I felt that tied it all together somehow.

So without much more adieu, I present some photographs of the setup.

Cheers....





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