“Interactive Animation of a Large Scale Crowd for Art Installations: the Case of Humanography” presented by Jacquemin and Martin
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Software for Artists
Presentation Title:
- Interactive Animation of a Large Scale Crowd for Art Installations: the Case of Humanography
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
The animation of large crowds is very appealing for interactive digital art because it offers a realistic representation of a public space through its social and affective life. We present an architecture for a sprite-based rendering of a crowd of silhouettes and its external control through behavior scripts. This architecture is illustrated on an installation of Benjamin Lee Martin called Humanography that depicts a collection of humans in their every-day environment performing easy-to-identify activities. Humanography is an interactive art installation that shows a world where everything has become transparent, everything but humans. We humans are the only visual markers in an invisible world, our world, earth.
Humans are accomplishing routines related to ordinary life such as walk, sit, run, work on a computer, or dance. If an animation is interrupted to be followed on by another one, an intermediary animation is triggered to allow for smooth transitions. A global parameterization of the installation is possible according to external events such as human control, measures of the ambient data, or remote data transmitted through the network. These parameters control how long humans stay in a loop in average, they control the distribution of humans on their activities, the speed of the loops, and the distribution of male and female avatars.
Humanography raises issues in digital art that are related to the complexity of animating a large number of virtual avatars with a high frame rate and soft animations. These issues concern rendering, animation, and control.
