Floating Painting

Byeongwon Ha / USA

Virginia Commonwealth University

www.bwonha.com

Floating Painting explores visitors’ passive role as a portrait model in interactive art. This visualizes the process of drawing a painting over a long time just as drawing a real portrait painting. A webcam scans a visitor’s face into an 18-by- 32 pixilated image, and the LED canvas emits one color pixel of the image per three hundred milliseconds in order, then the webcam simultaneously re-photographs the LED colors on the canvas. Next, viewers can see the drawing process that illustrates the face on the wall. Unlike most interactive art projects with real-time closed-circuit video systems, in Floating Painting, visitors as passive models experience temps mort, or dead time to see their slow portraits, and to rethink their role in interactive art.