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.

filters

Here is what I have been working on, this is the result of a lot of experimentation with filters used through bitmap data objects. The drawing object itself is a movie clip which has filters applied to it.

Sixth Sense at MIT labs

'The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user's hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.'
http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/index.htm



'But the current prototype promises to be a bit more consumer friendly. It consists of a small camera and projector combination (about the size of a cigarette pack) worn around the neck of the user. An accompanying smartphone runs the SixthSense software, and handles the connection to the internet.'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7997961.stm
The miniaturization of the camera/projector means that any surface can be used as a the display. Presumably the projector adjusts itself depending on the distance it is from the surface being projected upon and presumably it is also able to focus on a given surface depending once again on the distance. The cel phone runs the software that  motion tracks of the colored fingers. Using gps technology and internet search the software become exponentially extended.