Delphi - a touchscreen video game art installation for galleries and museums.
Viewers can explore a contemporary interpretation of the ancient Greek site of Delphi, home of a mythical oracle.
The Delphi gallery installation, designed for museums and cultural centers, gives each visitor about ten minutes to explore Delphi and visit the oracle to get a personalized message. The installation is easy to use, and accessible for general audiences of all ages and degrees of experience.
Two cubes (or a cube and a chair) are placed on a 7cm high, 2m square plinth stage; the large cube is a ventilated cabinet and tabletop for a touchscreen, the other cube is a seat. As players step up onto the plinth to interact with the touchscreen to explore the virtual world, they enter the installation observed by the other gallery visitors who watch the interaction on large video screens around them, displaying the virtual environment of Delphi onto the gallery walls, with soft, ambient sound of the Greek countryside and occasional interactive events.
Delphi requires controlled lighting and electricity, between 50-500 sq meters, large video displays, audio, plinth, and two cubes (or cube and chair) as above. An area of about 500 square meters is optimal, although smaller is possible. A CAVE version of Delphi is currently being researched.
Visitors can explore the environment in and around the hills and monuments of Delphi. By artificial intelligence, Delphi responds by AI to each visitors style of play, actions, responses, and behavior, choosing a classic Delphic maxim (150 Delphic maxims drawn from historical and literary sources) for each player in turn.
Unzip Delphi_Oracle_install.zip into a Windows folder to create a folder called Delphi_Oracle and its contents.
Change directories to browse into the Delphi_Oracle folder, and double-click on Delphi_Oracle.exe to play Delphi. If Microsoft Smartscreen asks to prevent an unrecognized app, click More info, and click Run anyway.
With mouse or touchscreen you can move and interact onscreen;
Slow or stop, left mouse button or touch the center of the screen
Move forward, mouse button or touch center top of screen (higher = faster)
Move backward, mouse button or touch center bottom of screen (lower = faster)
Turn right, mouse or touch right side of screen
Turn left, mouse or touch left side of screen
Look up and down, left and right mouse buttons together (or two fingers)
A touchscreen makes it feel very immersive, and a mouse also works just fine too.
Currently working to run Delphi in the CAVE software for CAVE systems.
Delphi is first and foremost a work of contemporary art and an interpretive reconstruction of a cultural treasure for everyone. Looking for a contemporary art gallery where I can premiere it.
-benb
copyright 2022 Benjamin Britton
June 14, 2022
all rights reserved
Belinda Reynolds (music), Ting Luo (piano and poetry), Charles Woodman (images)
WORDS is a multimedia piano work with spoken words and visuals. The vocal part consists of an aural collage of Miss Luo, reciting in Mandarin and English, a poem written by herself, about the story of her grandfather, a composer during the late 20th century in China. The interplay between the audio collage, the video, and the piano part, create a multimedia composition that immerses the audience in a blanket of enticing, reflective sound-visual experiences.
A small robot rests on the floor as the camera zooms close, a finger reaches out to turn the switch and the robot comes to life.
Sisyphus was produced by Subterranean Video, a video collective based at the Boston Film/Video Foundation, in 1983.
Sisyphus was premiered at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art as part of a show called "Boston Now:1984"
A visual interpretation of an ambient expression expressed in time; 17:52
original music and video by svid subterranean video
visual timed countdown for new years in boston 1983 hynes auditorium by video projection
The Fruit of Chardin is a video symphony following a group of friends who meet in the evening to eat, party, explore the city, and make video and music together. Includes rare footage of Subterranean Video and an interview with video artist Nam June Paik, who discusses the meaning of Fluxus.
Did We Go? is an experimental video art documentary that examines whether humankind really reached the Moon in the Summer of 1969. Documentary filmmaker Aaron Ranen explores America to search for the truth behind claims of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing. Original footage of many significant historical sites and interviews with first-hand participants in the Apollo 11 Mission. No matter what you believed before, this documentary will astonish you and change how you think about the first Moon landing forever.
To watch the entire video (sixty minutes), click on a link below.
This 7 minute demo reel contains excerpts from several 2006-11 shows including:
- Discerning Crane, Herron School for the Arts, Indianapolis, 2010
- NWEMO All Stars, NOTACON, Cleveland, 2010
- Adam Tendler, performing Sonatas and Interludes by John Cage, New Genres Festival, Tulsa, 2009
- Meg Schedel, Odd Nosdam and Why?, SF Cinematheque, San Francisco, 2006
Excerpts from live audio visual improvisation on May 5, 2017 at the Mockabee in Cincinnati, OH.
David McDonnell - reeds and electronics
Ofir Klemperer - electronics
Zach Larabee - percussion
Charles Woodman, Loraine Wible, Sayak Shome - images
Six screen video installation proposal for a church social hall – the black bars represent pillars between the screens in the proposed exhibition space.
Produced almost entirely at Experimental Television Center (ETC), the video uses a simple animation of a rotating rectangle (produced in Deluxe Paint on the Amiga Computer) as a stencil into which are keyed various versions of a processed live image of the river outside the window at ETC. This was my second attempt at a multi channel piece. The four programs have been shown in grid’s of twelve and sixteen monitors. While relatively simple in structure and shown only three times, this remains a personal favorite.
Mixed and performed live at the Experimental Television Center in 1992 with a special appearance by Vanna White. Audio by Dub Syndicate "Tunes From the Missing Channel."
Featuring Jack Charney as the nude. All made with analog tools. Shot and mixed during the six months I lived and worked at the Vasulkas home/studio in Santa Fe. Two ¾” tapes of the nude were mixed through a key/stencil of third video (originally shot on 8mm film in Sienna Italy) to make one version of the combined images Video1+ Video2+stencil=A then this process was repeated Video1+Video2+stencil=B, then the combined images were mixed together again through the same stencil A+B+stencil=Mix1.
This whole process was repeated twice and then those two were also combined. Then later some of those mixes were transferred to Betacam and slowed down. The final tape contains excerpts from a variety of the previous combinations with 2, 4 and 8 layers.
Six screen video installationFeaturing Jack Charney as the nude. All made with analog tools. Shot and mixed during the six months I lived and worked at the Vasulkas home/studio in Santa Fe. Two ¾” tapes of the nude were mixed through a key/stencil of third video (originally shot on 8mm film in Sienna Italy) to make one version of the combined images Video1+ Video2+stencil=A then this process was repeated Video1+Video2+stencil=B, then the combined images were mixed together again through the same stencil A+B+stencil=Mix1.
This whole process was repeated twice and then those two were also combined. Then later some of those mixes were transferred to Betacam and slowed down. The final tape contains excerpts from a variety of the previous combinations with 2, 4 and 8 layers.
This animation is created by Charles Woodman & Kim Anno. Woodman made the images and voice recordings Anno adapted "Canto 1" from Dante’s Purgatorio, making the text secular, and she created the soundscape effects. Keisha Kemper and Michael Burham are the actor’s voices.
Shot at the Ceran St. Vrain Trailhead and campground, near Jamestown, Colorado. St. Vrain’s Woods was inspired by Seurat among others. An exploration of the elasticity of time, it is a moving picture made only of still images and the spaces between them. A portrait of a place and a moment.
A few views of water and trees from my month long stay in Phoenecia, NY. This video utilizes an editing technique (a sort of continuous slow horizontal slide) that I conceptualized for more than a year. After several failed attempts I finally figured out how to make it work.
Live audio visual improvisation on 06/10/2016 at Modern Makers in Cincinnati, OH.
Ofir Klemperer (electronics), Eddy Kwon (violin), Zach Larabee (percussion), Sayak Shome (images), Charles Woodman (images), Matt Coors (wall treatment), Andy Knolle (projector massage), Harry Sanchez (projector massage), Dan Leonard (live camera), Melissa Godoy (documentation)