Handcar
Concept
A simulation of riding along on a handcar, as popularised by silent movies, featured in O Brother Where Art Thou, and generally celebrated by wacky North Americans. Participants in the artwork will have to pump the handcar to initiate and control a multimedia experience of travelling along a railtrack.
Background
Got hold of some creative commons licensed content called let’s go to birmingham thanks to impressive work by the BFI in opening up some of their back-catalogue and thanks to archive.org free online movie library.
Got thinking that it would be possible to create the experience of travelling on a handcar simply by controlling the speed of such a video (which shows a train journey to Birmingham last century) according to the amount that the individual pumped. Also liked the idea of friends visiting the exhibition facing each other and engaging in silliness. A nice feature of this is also that given two back-projected screens, both participants on the handcar would think they were going forward, until they looked behind them.
Immediately started worrying about the construction of a mechanism which would seem like a handcar, but would not kill people and invalidate our insurance. Hence I settled on the idea of not having any real mechanism at all, but instead emulating the mechanism by monitoring the position of people on the handcar, and only progressing the handcar when they were doing the right action. Rapid experimentation of pretending to ride a handcar (you go up when I go down) is quite hilarious, even without any kind of screen or train tracks at all.
Implementation
Got a simple implementation of controlling the framerate of the train video using processing. Need to be able to also detect the movement of people standing on the handcar, and translate this into the up and down motion of the transom. I’d also like to interleave some of the nice audio from the original video, like the train speeding up, and the frantic orchestral piece kicking in, depending on the speed which the participants had reached.
There was a suggestion that we could use either silent movie footage of handcars or a recording of people who act out what to do. This could be shown on a separate monitor.
Comments
dave on 12 October 2005
If you use the London to Birmingham movie you might be able to find a use for a volume visualisation like this.
martinsan on 21 October 2005
Thinking of Ipswich-ising this, then how about making an similar ‘tour-round-Ipswich’ video? My thought is that you need an A-frame with a pair of pram wheels at the bottom, and mount a digital camera on the top. Then push it round Ipswich (route?) and take pictures every so many metres… Seems to me that this would be a valuable local resource too!
dave on 08 December 2005
Hello - been experimenting a little in processing...
I’ve moved this comment to a new blog entry to be found here.