Fugitive is an interactive artwork which (via a machine vision system) interprets gross bodily movement as an indicator of "mood". The user moves through an impressionistic visual experience based in a digital video database. The question of Embodiment is central: we attempted to production a system which "speaks the language of the body". Artworks should be immediately accessible to any spect-actor. The complexity of interactive mode is low at the beginning of each users experiece, but increases as the user gains familiarity with the system. We call this idea of a transparent training "auto-pedagogic".
The question of the embodiment has become critical in computer science and cognitive science discourses. We argue that a large part of human understanding is necessarily "embodied". In general, tracker systems for immersive virtual environments and spatial applications reduce the physical presence of the user to one (or a small number) of points. Rather than submit a human user to such erasure, or to the discipline of encoding her desire into a abstract iconic or symbolic language amenable to a computer system, we argue that a new generation of real-time machine-vision systems are required to create an inteface which can interpret bodily dynamics. Fugitive, using one camera and simple image differencing, is the first of such experiments. The output of the system is completely free of textual, iconic, or mouse/buttons/menus type interaction. The fothcominging project (Traces) uses multiple cameras and builds real-time volumetric models.
http://www.ace.uci.edu/penny/works/fugitive/fugitive.html