Description of the installation
A scanned image of an (endangered) ecosystem, cast into the form of a point cloud, is connected to the camera feed (live or recorded) of a busy location (such as a public square, pedestrian zone, shopping mall, transportation hub) or, for demo purposes, a simple room.
Using computer-vision algorithms, passers-by are detected in the images and their movements get translated into forces that push and pull at the point cloud particles, thereby perturbing and deforming it. Each single person passing by introduces only a little extra disorder, usually too small to be perceived. However, as this process evolves for several hours, the combined effect of hundreds or thousands of individuals becomes apparent: The point cloud image, initially figural, intuitive and concrete, gradually morphs into a blurry, impressionistic, and finally, abstract chaos.
Perturbatio is designed to work with a variety of visualisation supports and to be easily adaptable to different exhibition environments. At the start, there is always a data input representing the movement of people in public spaces. This data can come from live or pre-recorded sources, using webcam streams or depth camera streams (e.g. from an XBox Kinect camera).
Then, the raw data is processed by the custom Perturbatio code and the resulting deformation forces are gradually applied to the point cloud.
At the same time, a graphical logbook is kept of the evolving point cloud which can be played back to view the deformations as an accelerated time-lapse. The live evolution as well as the time-lapse playback can be viewed e.g. on a large (TV) screen using a video projector.