Light Attack is a media artwork, as well as social experiment, performed in public urban spaces. While driving through the city, an animated virtual character is projected onto the cityscape, exploring places ‘to go’ and places ‘not to go’, according to the popular Lonely Planet travel guide.

Light Attack elaborates the concept of the ‘moving moving’ image - the projected moving imagery corresponds to the movement through the space while the character’s behavior is influenced by the urban context and passers-by. The piece suggests ‘projection’ as an emergent ubiquitous medium, raising questions about property and privacy. How public is public space? How do authorities deal with this question? How is ‘projection’, as a ubiquitous medium, changing the environment in which we live? In its first version, premiered in Los Angeles in 2004, Light Attack’s focused on the ambiguous nature of the city, such as logics of place, neighborhood, environment, landscape and social context in the stereotyped neighborhoods of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Downtown, Watts, and Compton.

Light Attack has received the Adjudicators’ Recommendation 8th Japan Media Arts Festival 2004, the Nabi Special Honorary Mention for UNESCO Digital Arts Award 2005, the Bernay Kurland Grayson Award for Creative Excellence 2005, the Art In Motion Award 2005. The piece has been exhibited at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena in 2005, the Beyond Media Festival 2005 in Florence, Italy, the SIGGRAPH 2006 conference in Boston, the Microwave Festival 2006 in Hong Kong, and the Connected exhibition 2006 at Art Center Nabi in Seoul, Korea.

Light Attack uses a custom mobile projection setup installed in a car to project an animated virtual character onto the cityscape. The setup includes a computer laptop, velocity sensor, power supply, projector, and a video camera to document the piece. The car’s movement through the city determines the virtual character’s behavior and motion patterns, synchronized by a velocity sensor attached to the car wheel and custom computer software. While the projection ‘scans’ over the buildings’ facades, the virtual character interacts with the passers-by and the buildings’ structure. Short pre-recorded video loops are arranged into seamless motion patterns by the computer software, allowing interaction with the architecture and passers-by in real-time. The imagery captured by the video camera combined with the velocity information from the public performance is used to create a gallery installation including a panoramic projection and a photographic sculpture. [ more information ]

Excerpts 2004-2007 [ movie clip, 320 x 240 px, 56.79 MB ]

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