Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko's paintings have been described as total immersion. I became dissatisfied with making a simple drawing application, it seemed once mastered to be rather shallow in its meaning. I have spent some time looking at ways of adding more dimensions to this project and to try some free form thinking. One conclusion was that something unexpected should happen during the interaction between the person playing with the installation and the installations itself. In the first instance, I revisted work by artist Camille Utterback, the way that she uses subverts the process of drawing by doing things that are counter intuitive such as having lines move away from the point of drawing and older lines gently migrating to a predetermined position were to some an extent an inspiration for me to explore the possiblitlies further.
I also thought it might be interesting to have the canvas be the focus of the interaction so that depending on what the person does it would change what happened on the screen before them, to this end I am developing an application which is based on the paintings of Mark Rothko. The idea is that a persons movements in front of the 'canvas' will trigger the images to change and morph into new configurations which is something that Rothko's paintings do on prolonged viewing. I want to end up with an immesive and evocative enviroment which is controlled and changed by the users. This is not to imply that it wont be surprising and hopefully delight. I also want to include a kind of sound scape that can envelop the space and may use a mixture of ambient sounds perhaps alongside some words from Rothko himself.
The demo below are the first steps. There is no cursor that you can see but if you make movements some things will begin to happen.