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ASPECT is a biannual DVD publication. Our mission is to distribute and archive works of time-based art. Each issue highlights artists working in new or experimental media, whose works are best documented in video or sound. |
Pedestrian by Heidi Eshkar and Paul Kaiser, 2002
interactive digital projection
Pedestrian projects its imagery directly down onto a city sidewalk or the concrete floor of an art gallery. Conceived as a public sculpture, Pedestrian’s digital projection merges with the rough surface we walk upon. The tiny denizens we see down there wander through a trompe-l’oeil illusion, in a city that seems to float both upon and within that surface.
As we observe them, these figures congregate and disperse in an everyday but mysterious fashion: they stand, watch, start and stop, meet, sit, move away, sometimes run, or perhaps even lie down. They move with an uncanny accuracy, for their movements were sampled and abstracted from real people by means of a technical process called motion capture. Their actions are pedestrian; but on longer observation the patterns they form seem oddly coordinated, as if unfolding in a story or deriving from a set of unknown principles.
As digital models built purely in 3D geometry on the computer, the Pedestrian figures represent a cross-section of urban archetypes: the suits and backpackers, couriers and working girls, socialites and bench sitters, skaters and civil servants. The environment under their tiny feet is an abstract and simplified game-board of Manhattan, with strong contours and rhythmic subdivisions. These grids, tiles, and area boundaries echo and emboss the real physical pavestones hit by the projection. We the viewers with our tall dark bodies stand in for the buildings of Manhattan’s verticality.
The drama of Pedestrian is decidedly strange. For while it does have you following individual characters within a scene, it’s never for long – the camera veers off as if distracted to follow another character intersecting the scene, and then another, and another. This succession comes to seem like an odd and unwitting relay race or game, each figure taking and then passing on the baton of your interest. It’s a series of partial and broken narratives, whose beginnings and endings are left to you to imagine. But isn’t this much like your own experience in the street, where first one person arrests your attention, but then quickly passes from view (and mind) at your next striking but equally fleeting encounter?
Credits
Artists: Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser
Sound design: Terry Pender
Additional animation: Keith Chamberlain
Installation architect: Marco Steinberg
Co-producers: Art Production Fund and Eyebeam
Motion capture was overseen by Lisa Naugle of UC Irvine’s Dance Department. Unreal
Pictures (Michael Girard and Susan Amkraut) provided software support. Connecting
Point Multi Media gave technical support. Additional support came from Dancing in the
Streets, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and from the University
of California: Irvine, School of the Arts, Department of Dance, with funds from the UCI
Chancellors Distinguished Fellow Grant.
As we observe them, these figures congregate and disperse in an everyday but mysterious fashion: they stand, watch, start and stop, meet, sit, move away, sometimes run, or perhaps even lie down. They move with an uncanny accuracy, for their movements were sampled and abstracted from real people by means of a technical process called motion capture. Their actions are pedestrian; but on longer observation the patterns they form seem oddly coordinated, as if unfolding in a story or deriving from a set of unknown principles.
As digital models built purely in 3D geometry on the computer, the Pedestrian figures represent a cross-section of urban archetypes: the suits and backpackers, couriers and working girls, socialites and bench sitters, skaters and civil servants. The environment under their tiny feet is an abstract and simplified game-board of Manhattan, with strong contours and rhythmic subdivisions. These grids, tiles, and area boundaries echo and emboss the real physical pavestones hit by the projection. We the viewers with our tall dark bodies stand in for the buildings of Manhattan’s verticality.
The drama of Pedestrian is decidedly strange. For while it does have you following individual characters within a scene, it’s never for long – the camera veers off as if distracted to follow another character intersecting the scene, and then another, and another. This succession comes to seem like an odd and unwitting relay race or game, each figure taking and then passing on the baton of your interest. It’s a series of partial and broken narratives, whose beginnings and endings are left to you to imagine. But isn’t this much like your own experience in the street, where first one person arrests your attention, but then quickly passes from view (and mind) at your next striking but equally fleeting encounter?
Credits
Artists: Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser
Sound design: Terry Pender
Additional animation: Keith Chamberlain
Installation architect: Marco Steinberg
Co-producers: Art Production Fund and Eyebeam
Motion capture was overseen by Lisa Naugle of UC Irvine’s Dance Department. Unreal
Pictures (Michael Girard and Susan Amkraut) provided software support. Connecting
Point Multi Media gave technical support. Additional support came from Dancing in the
Streets, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and from the University
of California: Irvine, School of the Arts, Department of Dance, with funds from the UCI
Chancellors Distinguished Fellow Grant.
