Lorenz Potthast, 2014
In the inside of the helmet the video-signal of a camera and the input of a microphone are processed by a small computer. The slowed down images are displayed right before the user’s eyes via a Head-Mounted Display and simultaneously shown at a monitor on the outside. In three different modes the lapse of time can be influenced through a remote control: In the auto-mode time is slowed down automatically and re-accelerated after a defined interval. The press-mode allows the specific deceleration of time and in the scroll-mode the user can completely control the speed of the elapsing of time.
Daniel Steegmann Magrané, 2015
Phantom consists of a virtual reality environment accessed through a pair of Oculus Rift goggles. This project was a collaboration with ScanLAB in London, who helped Steegmann to scan a piece of the Brazilian Mata Atlántica rainforest, one of the fastest disappearing environments of the world. Using Oculus technology, a system of Optitrack tracking cameras, and the application written by ScanLab, one can move through this environment to discover how one’s body interacts with the forest.
“Why not test the ability of the image to foster a union between ourselves and the world by creating the most supremely realistic copy of a place, one that can be inhabited and not just viewed? Why not return to the terminus of the steel cable spanning the jungle, where the 16mm camera ceased to record, and transform every living and inanimate and visible thing into infinitesimal polygons and fluid motion effects? Why not cross the abyss, finally, between ideas and things?”
-Daniel Steegmann Magrané
Steegmann attempts this by scanning a fifteen hundred square foot plot of jungle into an interactive space which the viewer can transport to through a gallery setting. Phantom transforms the viewer into a transient being in the forest–allowing us to interact with a part of the world we normally do not see, but effects our lives without us being aware of it.