Reflections / Shane Cooper

We went to the Ottawa School of Art to pick J up from her art class.
There is a special exhibition on in the gallery, currently — “Reflections”, an installation piece by Shane Cooper.
Shane Cooper is a New Zealand-based software engineer/artist whose resume includes scenes created for “Lord of the Rings” and the upcoming film “King Kong”.

His interactive exhibit, “Reflections” involves the capture of visitors’ movements via video camera. The images are projected on the opposite wall. The “neato” part is that all the images captured are also collected and then fed back into the computer and matched with like-images of other visitors’ images.
Visitors quickly catch on to the requirements of the system and by altering their position within the field of vision of the camera, either right-to-left or in height, images of previous visitors match their own movement across the screen.I found it particularly interesting to see the reactions of the kids. Adults tended to stick to simple back and forth movements. Kids, on the other hand, dances, bobbed and resorted to funny movements in order to “see what would happen”.
Unfortunately, because this is not a static exhibit, by any means, it is hard to photograph the interaction between the viewers and the projected images. The strobe effect catches one image at a time. While in real-time, the brain puts the images into a stream-like format, the camera “sees” each individual image in its own frame. I made some videos which caught the concept of the exhibit better.

Nose piercing….



Kris and Julia and I went out for a drive today and, on the spur of the moment (sort of… I have been contemplating it for a few years, now) I got my nose pierced.

Fricking computers!

Over the last couple of days, when using a particular database, with a particular program, and on a particular server at work, my computer has been doing the weirdest things.
  • can’t print… except on the odd occasion and no one can figure out why it works sometimes and not others
  • Can’t use the number pad (since I am dyslexic when it comes to nymber in a row, rather than in their orientation on the keypad, this is a pain in the ass!)
  • Can’t use the Shift key… not always…. only for the capital “H”….. It isn’t the “h” key since I can use small “h”. I have to use the Caps lock and then remember to take it off again so I don’t write a whole entry in caps.
  • Any action takes anywhere from 15 seconds to a full minute to complete. For instance, clearing a cell of information requires clicking on the cell, clicking INTO the cell, pressing F3, waiting for this action to be saved, (sometimes accompanied by the screen going completely grey for 15 secongs at a time) clicking back into the cell, adding the new text, saving the new text, going into the next cell…. 3 full minutes, at least. What SHOULD have taken me 20 minutes to edit took 5 hours…. Oh, did I mention being kicked out of the database and the program and several times off the server? Total of 5 times!
  • … and then… I get booted out of the program and the server and come back to find the entry for the whole document “ghosted out” (the document os noted as being “in use” which it isn’t……

ARGGGGHHHH!!!!!

I am very glad this is a long weekend (Thanksgiving).

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