In Pulse Room, exhibition visitors’ heartbeats are transmitted to 100 lightbulbs suspended from the ceiling. The interface, a simple metal handle, transmits a visitor’s pulse to a lightbulb after ten seconds. If another visitor touches the handle, his pulse is transmitted to the first lightbulb and the rhythm of its predecessor is transmitted to the next lightbulb in the series – thus the digital traces left by 100 visitors are permanently present in the exhibition in this poetic installation.

In Microphone, Lozano-Hemmer uses a vintage 1930s microphone that has been equipped with a loudspeaker. If a visitor speaks into the microphone, it reacts by playing what it has recorded from previous visitors. The effect is disconcerting, as if the technical device itself were answering and staging a dialogue.

The interactive installation Close-up, on the other hand, confronts viewers with slow-motion shots of other visitors to the exhibition. The shadows cast by hundreds of visitors unite to form the silhouette of each viewer in turn. The viewer recognises himself in the collaged portrait of previous visitors.

In RECORDERS, it is the visitors to the exhibition themselves who generate the content of the interactive installations. Lozano-Hemmer invites the public to participate actively and provides new possibilities for sensory perception via his intuitively configured interfaces. Tracking systems and pattern-recognising software of the kind used in surveillance technology undergo rededication in his works. The social aspect of communication, man and machine as conniving accomplices, is formulated rather than the monitoring function. The interaction between man and machine is staged as an intimate exchange between the viewer and the work.

In his large-scale works for public spaces, Lozano-Hemmer succeeds in making the sensitive interaction between viewers and a technical system become collective experience. For this reason, documentaries on several large-scale urban projects from the series Relational Architectures will also be shown in the exhibition at the Edith Russ Site for Media Art. In Vectorial Elevation, Under Scan, Frequency and Volume or Body Movies, works are presented in which passers-by unexpectedly become actors by making pictures visible in shadow plays on the façades of public buildings or open spaces or radio frequencies audible or by being able to guide real actions in public spaces via the virtual space of the internet.

“Like most people, I like living vicariously through technology. I am seduced by amplification, simulation, telematics and things that crash. I work with technology because it is impossible not to. Technology is one of the inevitable languages of globalisation. I like calling it a language because this conveys two attributes that are significant. Firstly, that technology is inseparable from contemporary identity, - there is no such thing as “what we were like before technology”-, and secondly that it is not something that has been invented or engineered, but rather that it has evolved through constantly-changing social, economic, physical and political forces.”

In each of the pieces, using a game controller, the viewer navigates freely throughout the 3D computer graphic environments. The spaces are comprised of both exterior and interior landscapes, each thematically, visually & sonically distinct where users can interact with avatars to create new performances / performance spaces.

SwanQuake is a surreal semi-abstract inhabited world, home to a series of potential encounters. These may be theatrical and dreamlike, sometimes uncanny perhaps even frightening, at times quotidian and familiar. It’s these interactions that inspire curiosity, wonder and the desire to continue looking and sensing. However, despite the title ‘mashup’ of computer game Quake and traditional ballet Swan Lake, there are no targets, health points, wins or dying swans here.

SwanQuake: The User Manual opens the project up to discursive reflection and expansion through its selection of articles and essays. In the first section, the User Manual takes you through some of the processes of making SwanQuake including sound composition, choreography and computer animation work. Also in section one is a modicum of do-it-yourself instructions and two views on Igloo’s work in relation to the wider field of digital arts practice and culture. In the second section, the User Manual broadens the scope of the discussion to include the ontology of game art, analysis of perspective in 3-D spaces, ‘uncanny’ realism and collisions between game artistry and commerce. With essays by Johannes Birringer, Helen Stuckey, Shiralee Saul, Bruno Martelli, Ruth Gibson, John McCormick, Katharine Neil, Alex Jevremovic, Adam Nash, Helen Sloan, Stephen Turk, Marco Gillies, Harry Brenton & David Surman. Reviewed here.

Igloo make intermedia works exploring the poetices of time, space and natural phenomena. Questioning the reality of nature and how it can be influenced by individual experience and collective mythology. Employing many of the tools of the military EC recently they have investigated the role of the’real’ in virtual environments.

Igloo are Ruth Gibson & Bruno Martelli who have earned a string of accolades for their artwork including a NESTA award for SwanQuake, a commission from the Royal Opera house for Goodbye Venus and a BAFTA nomination in 2002 for WindowsNinetyEight.

Becoming Dragon: Stage 1 - Overview: I am interested in exploring the question of how technology can facilitate new somatic practices of gender and sexuality beyond male and female and even beyond the limitations of what we consider human. Using a conception of identity and a process of social interactions and feedback loops, I plan to use the online public space of Second Life as the site of my investigation.

While Marshall McLuhan said that “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us,” I am interested in the time after that. What is the process by which we shape our avatars and then our avatars shape us and then we reshape our avatars and on and on? In the Lacanian Mirror Stage, an infant tries to achieve the image of themselves that they see in the mirror when they mistakenly think they are standing on their own. How does this process continue in a feedback loop and develop into new conceptions of self beyond our current conceptions of our own limits?

“The becoming-woman serves as a point of reference, and eventually as a screen for other types of becoming (example: becoming-child as in Schumann, becoming-animal as in Kafka, becoming-vegetable as in Novalis, becoming-mineral as in Beckett)… There is no such thing as woman per se! No maternal pole, no eternal feminine… The man / woman opposition serves to establish the social order before class and caste conflicts. Inversely, whatever shatters norms, whatever breaks from the established order, is related to homosexuality or a becoming-animal or a becoming-woman.” - Felix Guattari, Becoming-Woman

The Performance

I would like to experiment with long durational performances of non-human characters in Second Life. How much immersion is possible? Transsexual people are required to live for a year as their chosen gender before being allowed by their psychologist to get their Gender Confirmation Surgery. Could this be replaced by virtual living?

Many contemporary performance artists claim to be doing performances “in second life”. I would like to try to get a little closer to this claim by waking up and falling asleep “in second life”. My initial plan is to do up to 30 days “in second life”, but I may have to scale back to 14 days.

There is a long history of durational performances in performance art, such as Teching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1980 - 1981 (Time Piece) [5], Marina Abramovic’s “When Time Becomes Form” [6] and her series of durational works, Joseph Beuys “I Like America and America Likes Me“, and Chris Burden’s “White Light/White Heat” [7] where he lived in the gallery. How does the duration of the performance change its effect? Can the identification with an Avatar or a virtually constructed identity be pushed farther than it is with frequent users of these environments? Can one live “in second life”?

During the performance, I would be available to an audience both in Second Life and in the physical space of CRCA at Calit2. There are a number of interesting options for audience interaction such as the display wall, having multiple screens / computers in the performance space and even having an additional immersive environment where a viewer could participate. How can technology facilitate a powerful, interesting, compelling performance simultaneously in physical and virtual space?

Technical Approach - Augmented Reality

The goal here is to develop a working, immersive Augmented Reality system, to port a motion capture and head mounted display to control a character in Second Life, an Online Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG).

[Some Second Lifers use the term "Metaverse" over MMORPG to emphasize SL's very different "Magic Circle". In SL, the game is a very different one, less an escapist fantasy world of play, or a more mature projection of identity in an economy with real currency and a capitalist business culture designed to soften the connotations of gameplay ... - BS] [8]

My initial conception of this project is to model my physical environment to enable me to live in the virtual environment for extended amounts of time. This is an approach of Augmented Reality, where the physical world is mapped into the virtual. Of course, Augmented Reality is a misnomer, because Reality itself is a mediated state, it seems a better term would be Augmented Bodies.

The plan would be to use the following components:

* An immersive head mounted display (HMD) The display would allow me to move around in my physical environment within calit2 and still remain “in game”. Head tracking would help to provide a realistic feeling of immersion and audio is built-in to the device as well.

* A motion tracking system. The Performative computing lab at CRCA houses a Vicon motion capture system, which allows real-time motion tracking data to be sent to a windows pc. Using these signals, I would be able to map my physical motion in the real world back into game space, so that, for example, I could easily get to my food source or to the restroom.

* A computer running second life, receiving the data back from my physical interface and sending them to my character “in game”, allowing me to participate in social interactions.

Limitations and Challenges

A number of “fundamental” components of “virtual reality” are not met by Second Life, or are hard to meet.

* One main issue is stereoscopic or true 3d vision. Can Second Life be augmented / configured to send out two video feeds for the same character?

* Another issue is the question of the Second Life API’s and how much interactivity they facilitate. How can we send the Vicon motion capture system signals to second life to map into “in game” gestures?

* Another hardware issue is the HMD. Many HMD’s are heavy and not designed for long term use. In addition, having screens so close to one’s eyes for an extended period of time is very strenuous. I plan to discuss the possible stress effects with a doctor at UCSD.

Timeline and Plan

In the spring 2008 quarter, I will be teaching an advanced elective in the Visual Arts Department entitled “Collective Art Practice - Networked and Performative Approaches to Challenging Power” with final projects in Second Life. If there are students who are interested in collaborating with me, they may work with some of the above mentioned hardware and software, collaborating and working towards the technical solutions to the above problems. You can read more about the class here.

I plan to develop the technical components of the project between June and October, with a goal of doing the performance in November or December.

Conceptual Background and Frame

For more conceptual background and to see the other stages of my Becoming Dragon project, see Becoming Dragon.

Footnotes

5. http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/one-year-performance/video/1/

6. http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/28029

7. http://www.feldmangallery.com/pages/exhsolo/exhbur75.html

8. BS - contributions from Brett Stalbaum

[posted on SPECTRE]

Glow is an illuminating choreographic essay by Artistic Director Gideon Obarzanek and interactive software creator Frieder Weiss. Beneath the glow of a sophisticated video tracking system, a lone organic being mutates in and out of human form into unfamiliar, sensual and grotesque creature states.

Utilising the latest in interactive video technologies a digital landscape is generated in real time in response to the dancer’s movement. The body’s gestures are extended by and in turn manipulate the video world that surrounds it, rendering no two performances exactly the same.

In Glow, light and moving graphics are not pre-rendered video playback but rather images constantly generated by various algorithms responding to movement. In most conventional works employing projection lighting, the dancer’s position and timing have to be completely fixed to the space and timeline of the video playback. Their role is reduced to the difficult chore of making every performance an exact facsimile of the original. In Glow, the machine sees the performer and responds to their actions, unlocking them from a relationship of restriction and tedium.

Several of the bottles are being tracked using GPS technology and are programmed to send their longitude and latitude coordinates back to Ramsgate every hour. The information they transmit is used to create a real time drawing of their progress.

If you have found a message in a bottle please report it here. Once you have reported finding the bottle please replace all of the bottle’s contents, reseal the bottle and release it back into the sea to continue its journey to The Chatham Islands.

Each non-GPS bottle contains a message from residents of Ramsgate to the residents of The Chatham Islands, a pencil and an instruction leaflet which requests anyone finding a bottle to report to this website and record where and when the bottle was found. In addition they are requested to document their find on a form inside the bottle before returning the bottle to the sea to continue its journey. Details of found bottles may be viewed on the view found bottles page.

Essay by Jeremy Millar

The function of art is to imitate nature in her manner of operation, and nature operates from chance. Simple minds cling to the illusion of an orderly, powerful universe because it gives them a sense of security. - John Cage, American composer, writer and artist

Layla Curtis’ work has often been about the attempts we make to order the world, to chart it and the security that this brings; or rather, the insecurity that results from our inability to do so. This is made particularly evident when Curtis manipulates maps until we become aware that that which we thought familiar is instead strange, as when a map of Britain is constructed from a series of European road maps (The United European Union, 1999) or, perhaps more appropriately, that a world map is made of a collage of American topographical maps (World State, 2001).

This fascination with charting the earth, and the creation of forms of positioning and time-zones which result, have played an important part in the development of this new commission for Turner Contemporary, one in which the local and the global are invited to engage with one another.

Upon first visiting the nearby Ramsgate Maritime Museum, Curtis was struck by the panel above its entrance exclaiming that Ramsgate time was five minutes and forty-one seconds faster than Greenwich Mean Time, a reminder that until the late nineteenth-century, most of the world still operated on local times, based upon astronomical observations and other variations and traditions. It was the rapid development of the railway - and the rapidity of travel that it allowed - which necessitated a change, and in 1847 the first standard national time was introduced in Britain, with other countries with rail travel following shortly afterwards. (However, even in 1870, a passenger travelling from Washington to San Francisco would have had to have reset his/her watch over two hundred times to remain in all the time zones en route.) Curtis was also fascinated by the longitudinal line set within the floor of the museum, which marks a line 1º 25.4′ east of the zero meridian at Greenwich. While to some extent determinedly local, such a marking also positions the local within a global system of measurement, and in doing so suggests its relationship to places far away. Indeed, once Curtis had the longitudinal and latitudinal values of the museum, it was a matter of simple arithmetic to determine those of the place antipodal to it, that is, the opposite point on the earth.

The closest inhabited land to this abstract mathematical position was found to be an island about 800 kilometres east of mainland New Zealand which, until 1791, was know as Rehoku. However, in that year Captain Broughton ‘rediscovered’ the island and, with an arrogance all too familiar in such matters, named this already-inhabited island after his ship, HMS ‘Chatham’, which had been built in Dover. It seems as though Curtis’ mental voyage had not only taken her to the opposite side of the world but had also, upon arrival there, brought her back to Kent.

Over two hundred years after this early - indeed defining - connection between Kent and this remote Pacific island, Curtis decided to instigate another. Of course, it is far easier to communicate between these two places now than was even conceivable in the late eighteenth century. Instead, Curtis decided to employ some of these advanced communications technologies - such as mobile phones and global positioning systems - within a far older, and certainly less-directed, means of communication - a message in a bottle.

Usually one does not send a message in a bottle to a specific place but rather it is left to make its way to any other place, any place other than that from which it was sent, that is. Indeed, it is scarcely a means of communication at all, as we might now understand it, as most often the sender has no means of knowing whether his or her message has been received and by whom. For Curtis to release fifty one bottles off the coast of Ramsgate - forty five containing a message from children at the local Northdown Primary School, and five containing GPS devices which will track and transmit their position - seems an act of the utmost folly, particularly if we consider the wealth of communications technology contained within a number of the bottles. Yet, if we deem Curtis’ attempt in advance as a failure - that the bottles will never reach the Chatham Islands - perhaps it is because we have misunderstood how art, and Curtis’ art in particular, might be said to operate. Indeed, let us be clear: art is not a simple communication of information (any more than it is the expression of pure emotion), and so while Curtis may fail to communicate as she had intended, it does not mean that her art has failed likewise. John Cage also remarked, with regard to both art and nature, that ‘the highest purpose is to have no purpose at all’.

Indeed, it is through the very lack of direct communication that a space is opened up through which can travel not only the bottles themselves, and our imaginations, but also many new possibilities; the many other people in many other places who may now come across them, noting their position online or within the bottle, before returning them on their way. This is the chance to which Cage referred to at the beginning of this piece, a chance that lies at the very heart of how both art and nature might be said to operate. What is particularly pleasing in this regard is that while Curtis has imitated nature in the manner of her operation, rather than its appearance, leaving the movement of the bottles subject to the forces of wind and wave, the lines which we see projected upon the wall at Droit House, do indeed bear a strong formal relationship to waves themselves, their swirls and folds, eddies and falls. It is a drawing of elegance and fragility that is produced by some of the most powerful forces that act upon our planet, a drawing that is both topographically accurate and yet resolutely abstract, a drawing in which the bottles appear both now-here and nowhere. Standing within a small circular room on the edge of England, we are invited to imagine ourselves drifting through a far greater space. The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote that ‘to think is to voyage’, and I would suggest that the complementary statement is also true, that to voyage is to think, and that the voyage of these bottles very much encourages us to do just that.

Jeremy Millar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waxo36sz9oo

Meeting Places: Art and Science, Performance in Real and in Virtual Hellerau - review of November 18, 2007 performance at CYNETart07_encounter - by Johannes Birringer.

this project is a collaboration between King’s Visualization Lab (KVL, King’s College London) and TMA Hellerau with the aim of creating a mixed-reality installation that can extend a historical performance design concept (created in the beginning of the 20th century by Adolphe Appia and Emile Jacques-Dalcroze at Hellerau’s new school of Eurhythmics) into digital / computational environments and the cyberspace of Second Life.

[opening of the performance, the musicians walk onto the digital set] the performance took place in the great hall at 17:00 and again provided a unique historical moment whose significance one might not be aware of now — and what the future of such experiments will bring we don’t know at this point. but in the dance world, and in performance and music culture generally as well as in historical, archaeological and ethnographic research, the computer-assisted 3D modeling/visualization and recreation of material artefacts, sources and architectures is a technologically enabled science. visualizations of course also find some of their most remarkable manifestations in the medical field and the bio-technologies.

i had seen recreations before (in dance), and remember seeing a large exhibition (sponsored and supported by IBM and the Italian government) at Houston’s MFA that recreated the destroyed city of Pompeii constructing computer-generated models of its urban habitats, political, economic and social lifeforms as one could deduce them from sources that survived from calculations and approximations.

here at Hellerau we witnessed an encounter of the third kind, a world premiere that is not easy to describe. the scientific and artistic research project derived from Magruder’s view of Appia’s original rhythmic space designs as conceptual explorations of space, not as illustrative plans for possible stage constructions. his reflection on Appia’s spatial theories coincided with King’s Visualization Lab’s start up of the Theatron 3.0 project, which began with the reconstruction of Hellerau in Second Life. The interdisciplinary nature of the project gathered together people with expertise ranging from theatre history and performance to advanced 3D modelling and scripting techniques. for the Cynetart07 premiere, the creative partnership also involved live performance realizations in Dresden composed by Prof. Christine Straumer and seven rhythmic students of the Carl Maria von Weber Music Academy.

the local group of music/rhythm students — Florian Maser, Katarzyna Gorczynska, Thu Trang Nghiem, Elisabeth Lochmann, Ulrike Spörl, Stefanie Richter & Astrid Eisler — performed an improvised musical choreography inspired by Emile Jacques Dalcroze’s gestural sequences (plastique animée). these sequences were taken from his writings and sketches, not from of the 1912 production of Orpheus here at Hellerau (originally envisioned and realized inside the Adolphe Appia designs for “Rhythmic Spaces”), of which no scores or film footage survives, to my knowledge, although here it would be good to consult Richard Beacham (King’s College) , whose expertise scholarship guided the project and whose seminal book on Appia paved the way for this partnership with Magruder and Drew Baker (3D modeling and programming). Richard Beacham’s book is entitled Adolphe Appia: Artist and Visionary of the Modern Theatre (Philadelphia, 1994; Adolphe Appia - Künstler und Visionär des modernen Theaters, Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2006).

[first picture/scene] speaking to the dancing musicians, i gathered that they were in fact inspired by the musical ideas their teacher, Christine Straumer, developed with them for finding movement material that corresponded to Appia’s drawings and sketches of rhythmicized light and space. the group developed three “Bilder” (scenic pictures), which were named “staircase,” “transformation,” and “orpheus.” these pictures corresponded to the “Rhythmic Spaces” Magruder had built, and they also corresponded to different colors (green-yellow for Part I; blue for Part III, the “transformation” representing the deformation and reformation of the digital space).

Straumer, in turn, improvised on the grand piano and created the improvisational musical sequences after the movement material had been found. Straumer sees her playing as live improvisation, and the music students perceive their dance in the same way, but they are fully conscious of the signficance of the spatiality of Appia’s vision, the rhythms of space (terrains) and staircases . there are three levels of symmetrical heights (66 cm, 132 cm, 198 cm in height, 8 m in length, 3 m in width), and the scenographic environment was built at the tall end of the Hellerau Festpielhaus, with Magruder’s digital set (inside Second Life) projected onto the architecture.

[Umformung / transition] so we were able to see the performance on the very location where the 1912 production of Orpheus was created, except that we are now in the real/renovated historical building with Appia’s set and scenography digitally created and projected by Magruder. but rather than using VRML or a game engine, Magruder’s 3D digital “Rhythmic Spaces” metaversal environment has been transferred to a large SIM in Second Life.

[3.Bild / 3rd scene] the real musician-dancers performed their Dalcroze improvisation on the real and projected/virtual platforms and staircases of Magruder’s digitally re-elaborated Appia set in front of a sinking “Appia” sun which is actually the atmospheric nature environment in Second Life, so I am told. the night before i sat quietly in the studio to watch Magruder work inside Second Life, and noted the slowly, subtly changing colors of the horizon, misty clouds drifting in the distance, surely, i thought, some kind of late night consensual hallucination caused by lack of sleep. Magruder here seems a kindred spirit to Olafur Eliasson, whose Weather Project had a strong hyperrealist effect on our perception through the use of powerful, monochrome orange light. he welcomes the natural-artificial oscillations of light (daylight, sunlight, clouds drifting by, the mist in the distance…) in Second Life, and during the presentation he performed some uncanny maneuvers to transmutate the Bilder (scenes) for the musician-dancers, as he was able to make the Appia 3D sets slowly disintegrate and change into different spaces of scenic- rhythmic lighting. a choreography of light and slow mutation, a mesmerizing thing without name.

the exploration here points to the interrelationships between real and virtual worlds, connected through the network and the technologies (positional tracking, motion tracking, etc) that connect physical performance rhythms and motion behaviors of avatars in tele-plateaus and their second-life versions.

in a post show discussion, Magruder pointed to data in/data out issues that he is examining now, and inspired by the experience of the audience participants in the tele-plateaus (responding to abstract shapes they generated on the floor projections), he suggested that it might be interesting to transfer (simultaneously) the generative algorithms of the motion-tracked tele-peformers into a Second Life environment where the performers can see their representations (their “physical gaming” action) as avatars in the virtual environment.

johannes birringer

The movement of the camera across the terrain is remapped to a static landscape - as if the viewfinder was revealing only small sections of the landscape at a time. Camera movement is remapped relative to the static objects in the footage. The image is stabilised by motion-tracking technology which allows for compensation for much of the movements of the aircraft. The movement of the rectangular viewfinder is negative to the movement of the camera. The real and the virtual space juxtapose and the sniper on board of the aircraft can use the virtual reconstruction to “act upon the situations” both in the virtual space as in the real world. Then it’s all just a matter of pushing a button. Out of an indifferent space of a virtual reconstruction, just like from the real space the functionary - operator / the sniper picks those parts that are assigned to him by his programme, which is searching and destroying targets. Vilém Flusser speaks of the apparatus, the operator and the program as one complex entity. It does not matter if it’s a photographer with a camera or a sniper his equipment. They both just push buttons.

Installation of this material in the gallery space is conceived with emphasis on visceral interaction with the viewers, who find themselves physically confronted with the video. The original footage is downloaded from the Internet. The images are taken from AC-130 Spectre US gunship in Afghanistan (ASE II.) and from probably a helicopter in Iraq (ASE I.).

Threatbox.us is an art installation with web surveillance interface in which a movie frame “attacks” visitors via a robotic video projector and computer vision tracking system. The beam of light that technologies of vision cast upon the world is also always the line of sight for a weapon with which to destroy what the beam presents as its ‘objective’ — its target. The moving projection becomes an aggressor. The merging of these technologies of vision and of destruction result in our “military-entertainment” industry. Threatbox.us seeks to question the ideological onslaught of American military-entertainment politics.

Over the past few years, Sester has been examining the compromise, and prize of personal commitment, between self-awareness and subjection. ACCESS (2003-2005) focused on the ambiguity among surveillance, control, and visibility, celebrity. BE[AM] (2005-2007) focuses on the intertwining of military, entertainment, marketing, and the underlying political ideology. Threatbox.us focuses on the aggression that the military and entertainment industries together use to disseminate their propaganda.

Threatbox.us also questions interactivity, and therefore control, as a genre. In this work, the interacting persons are unsuspecting and have no power over their interaction. The web users are powerless as well, witnesses or voyeurs. The rules are set inside the frame of the event, or stage, or game, or – at a larger scale – the consumption economy, the “new world order”, the terrorist fear, and the security industry.

Threatbox.us turns a space into an environment in which unsuspecting passers-by encounter video “apparitions” of popular media. A public scale video projection teases viewers with slight but noticeable movements on the wall, moving up, down, to the right, to the left, an unusual way for an advertisement or information screen to behave.

If the passer-by approaches, she enters a detection zone and is tracked by a hidden video camera on the ceiling. As soon as she is detected, the projected movie “attacks” her by swiftly moving onto her body and simultaneously transforming into a purple spotlight, while emitting a loud, threatening sound. This purple light encircling her body encloses her like a target. She cannot escape it. She becomes the center of attention in the public space and to anonymous web users watching online. She is freed of it after several seconds. The projector then moves quickly back on the wall, playing the continuation of the movie, and is ready to attack the next person to be detected.

The background material for Threatbox.us comes from a database that Sester has collected of popular films, animations, comic books, TV shows, TV news, and computer games. The foreground material will use effects such as explosions, plane crashes, military orders, war zones, disasters, and domestic scenes of people passively engaged in entertainment.

The web component is real time streaming of the space, its public, the movie and the attacks. As for the unsuspecting “targeted” visitors, the web users have no action on what they witness.