\\ The Ball in the Hole //

Concept

The ball in the hole is easy and fun.
Using a colorful ball you can delete your projected image to see what (or who) is in the hole.

You'll enter a journey where you can understand and reveal the other through the erasure of the self. The person behind the hole will appear to disappear again. The emphasis is on the line separating and connecting the visual to the concrete world. The ball and the hole. The person's movement is his deletion.

The ball in the hole is a social installation/performance where the user becomes the actor of metamorphosis. The discovering of the self and the legendary mirror to other dimensions is experienced through a real-time tactile digital environment.
The Alter is someone else, and the deformation shown is a constant force that the user can apply to his virtual figure.
The image becomes fragile and shows its temporary value. The reflection of identity, reality and representation becomes a playful, intimate and dislocated game of drawing and deleting limits and borders.

Description

The Ball in The Hole is an interactive video installation, running on GPL homemade software.

Two rooms are showing a sort of projected mirror, where the user can see and recognize himself.On the floor there is a spiral, containing a luminescent ball. When the user grabs the ball, spontaneously attempting to play with it, the projected mirror will start erasing, showing the other room. The ball will work on the video as a rubber on a pencil drawing. The two rooms / spaces are symmetrical.

After the complete erasure of the image, the mirror will show the remote room only. At this point the ball will have the capability to erase the other person / space / video, and this deletion of the Alter will correspond to the redrawing of the Self.

The process continues endlessly rendering the installation a social happening where the user becomes the main character of an improvised performance.

Exhibitions

* London (UK) March 25/27 2012 @ Queen Mary University. Video display.
* Mexico City (Mexico) March 26/28 2008 @ CAC.2.
* Augsburg (DE), September 23/29 2007 @ ACM Multimedia 2007.
* Sao Paulo (BR), Aug 13th / Sept 09th 2007 @ FILE.
* Milan (Italy), 21/27 March 2007 @ La Cueva No-Art Gallery. Video.
* Bergen (Norway), October 13/19 2006 @Piksel. Video.

Software

This software is FLOSS (Free and Libre Open Source Software) and released under the GNU GPL License. It's in C language (but object oriented) and based mainly on ffmpeg and sdl. It runs on GNU/Linux. Author: Kysucix.
Get CODE.

Videos

Tech

2 separate spaces, we prefer two crowded ambients with a stable light environment.
2 beamers.
2 networked computers with a video4linux compatible card for video acquisition each.
2 video-cameras (analogue it's OK).
4 Luminescent Balls.