Delicate Boundaries

As digital technologies become more embedded in everyday life, the line between the virtual and real is increasingly blurred. Delicate Boundaries imagines a space in which the worlds inside our digital devices can move into the physical world. Small bugs made of light, crawl out of the computer screen onto the human bodies that make contact with them. Using video cameras, IR lights, digital projector, custom software, and the power of illusion and play, a strange world comes to life.

These digital bugs appear to emerge from the computer screen, often surprising their audience as they abandon a virtual existence. The magic of this illusion takes shape as the audience lets them explore their bodies, and interacts with something made completely out of light. This interaction takes place largely on the persons body creating a strangely intimate space where viewing the artwork also means looking at your own body.

The use of lifelike movements and behaviours in this piece explores the border between something playful and something a bit more suspect. The system is embodied as something responisve organic that invites interaction, and it is quite interesting when an audience can consider something made out of light as having substance. The software developed for this piece uses video surveillance and image processing to track the audience as they interact. The system attempts to understand where someone touches the screen and where the bugs can crawl and keeps them inside the boundaries of the body. This creates a rather interesting paradox and one that is often present in digital technologies. The system is masked in a representational form that is so playful and seemingly benign, and that creates a space that is private and individual that the invasive aspects of it are perhaps forgotten.

_Images (pdf)
_Tech Rider (pdf)
_Artist Bio

Vida Awards at Arco '08, Madrid, Spain, 2008
Pixel Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2007
a-m-b-e-r 07, Istanbul, Turkey, 2007
elife, Madrid, Spain, 2007
Nit CASM Hangar Obert, Barcelona, 2007
Inside Outside, Jersey City, NJ, 2007
FILE Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2007
SonarMática, Sonar Festival, Barcelona, Spain 2007
Interactivos?, MediaLabMadrid, Madrid,Spain 2007

Zachary Lieberman
Damian Stewart
Blanca Rego
Jordi Puig
Gonzalo Posada

everyone at MediaLab Madrid!
interactivos? crew
Eyebeam
Bao-Khang Luu
Zach Lieberman
Sonar Festival
Yan-Yan Cao
everyone at FILE
Doris and everyone at _gaia
Pedro, Merche, Lluis y todos en Hangar
Pedro Maisterra
Ekmel, Ozlem, Kemal, Gülay, Gunes and the amazing crew at a-m-b-e-r
Steve, Zach and the folks at pixel gallery
Alejandro y todos a Fundación Telefónica