“Crow Panel” by Judith Doyle

Title:

Crow Panel

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

2015

Medium:

Interactive media installation, depth camera sensor and programming developed using Processing, in collaboration with Chao Feng, with programmers Nick Beirne and Naoto Hieda.

Artist Statement:

Doyle transposes this procedural aesthetic evident in Phantom House onto her more recent responsive large-scale media installations. With Crow Panel, Doyle and her PointCloud series collaborators Chao Feng, along with programmers Nick Beirne and Naoto Hieda, expose realtime and allegorical aspects of a space where the movement of crows intersects with that of people. It draws attention up to birds occupying vertical cities, and their emerging forms of urban intelligence. Audience members emerge as surface impressions, appearing in and influencing a hybrid environment of crow forms eliciting a type of human-animal interaction facilitated by algorithmic agents. For Doyle and her team Crow Panel is a speculative “mirror machine”¹⁾providing an opportunity for the public to become participating agents of disruption (Marchessault). It both displays and cloaks figures in the surface impressions it generates, supporting post-human embodiment. Using depth cameras and original software, Judith Doyle and her collaborators on the PointCloudseries investigate the characteristics of physical movement in what has become a disruptive documentary medium. They invite us as participants into an admixture of points of light as gestural form offering up whole body renderings rather than the harsh reality of high definition we repeatedly encounter in contemporary media.

“Mirror Machine: Video and Identity” 2006 YYZ Books anthology, edited by Janine Marchessault. The term is appropriated to describe the structure of the PointCoud depth camera/projection system.