This process was an Internet success story, later in the real life production we ran into a series of failure.
During a presentation of our shopping-trolley robot at Universita La Sapienza in Rome some years ago I met David Dalmazzo. He does a lot of interactive works and explained me briefly how he used infrared cameras in several dance productions. This was the wonderful world of background elimination.
So when we where approached by IED Madrid to build an installation for the PHotoEspaña festival, the time had come to put the theory into practice. A quick search in the big library revealed a way to hack webcams into infrared cameras. The technical department did it in 5 minutes, while the performance department used a staggering 5 hours. Once inside the infrared part of the spectrum we started experimenting, finding light sources and filters, calibrating the software and preparing for the on-site setup.
The actual construction included memorable moments like using one day to build lights that we couldn’t use, buying infrared diodes at this very special shop only to discover that they gave us cancerous ultraviolet ones and so forth…
neo-norwegian experiments in art and technology 