Ersatz
Ersatz is an interactive installation, featuring a life-sized 3D computer-generated performer, a portrait of the artist created using 3D body scanning and motion capture techniques.
Year: 2004
Exhibitions: ‘Creative Digital Interaction Symposium’, Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland (2004); ‘Budget Bureau’, Centre D'art Contemporarin, Geneva, Switzerland (2005); ‘[prologue]’, Cornerhouse, Manchester, England (2005)
Video documentation: installation demo at Creative Digital Interaction Symposium
Duration: 01:26mins
The Ersatz installation features a responsive, 3D computer-generated portrait of the artist, created using 3D body scanning and motion capture techniques. Presented as a life-sized digital figure, the portrait switched between two animated states; posed (aware) or waiting (unaware). These states were triggered by the audience’s proximity to the work, giving the sense of a character precariously existing in a state between anticipation and observation.
The portrait was created by using a high-end closed 3D scanning booth at the 3D-matic Centre, University of Glasgow, allowing Beverley to be captured in 3D from a 360° angle, as a highly detailed 3D model. The resulting model was a complex, but in some aspects incomplete, digital mesh, having clearly apparent gaps and glitches, due to the limitations of the structural light scanning process. Rather than manually clean-up these errors, Beverley embraced them as a more ‘authentic’ representation of the technology’s vision, and the body scan was left in it’s ‘natural’ state, including faults and ruptures.
Motion capture, undertaken at the Edinburgh Virtual Environment Centre (EdVEC), was then used to bring the digital portrait ‘to life’. Full body movements were captured that were intentionally subtle; the artist at rest, shifting weight from hip to hip, arms on waist, gazing at the floor, and trying to hold steady the posed stance required for the body scanning process.
The resulting interactive installation presented a projected, digitally animated character, which switched between posed or waiting states, controlled by a programme written in Macromedia Director and proximity sensors.
The aim was to creatively explore how a synthetic and obviously manufactured figure can provoke an intimate and meaningful encounter with the viewer, yet at the same time remain recognisably artificial. The work plays with the long tradition of artist’s self-portraiture in art history and expands upon this genre within the context of 21st-century technology and techniques.
Funded by: Developed at the Edinburgh Virtual Environment (EdVEC), University of Edinburgh through a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence Grant (Sept 03 - June 04), with project costs funded by an AHRB Small Grant in the Creative & Performing Arts.
