What are some of the primary themes for your project
When we collaborate with students in our Lumiere Ghosting discussions and in the development process for the CompuObscura, we often divide into small groups focused on some of the project's primary themes. These themes then serve as starting points for the questions that we ask each other throughout the term. These themes have also served as the basis for the development of different physical structures our architecture students created for the CompuObscura.

How do shadow and live theater serve as themes for the project?
All modern moving-picture media are built upon the ideas and narratives developed for live theatrical presentation and shadow puppet play. The keys to these elements are the human voice, the motion of the human form, the abstraction of shadow and the shifting metaphors of interactive visual signs. Lumiere Ghosting wants to make specific reference to this history of live theater and shadow puppets in the design of the CompuObscura device.

How does film serve as a theme for the project?
When film first began it was a documentary format. Filmmakers went into a community, shot footage, developed it, then showed it in the evening in make-shift theaters. Some of these “theaters” were nothing more than a tree with a sheet hanging from a branch as a screen. Other theaters were more like carnival sideshow tents that could be put up for the day, then taken down and moved to the next town in a bag. This early format was short, ephemeral, and often directly connected to the environment in which the images were shot. Lumiere Ghosting wants to make specific reference to this history of the temporary, side-show nature of early film in the design of the CompuObscura device.

How do the camera obscura and the occult serve as themes for the project?
The idea of the camera obscura has been with us since the times of Plato (see the allegory of the cave from The Republic for an idea of this) and was often used as part of the visual arts. From the very beginning, the projection of moving images through a camera obscura format has been associated with the supernatural and has often been part of magic and sorcery. During the 1800s camera obscuras became a popular form of entertainment as people became more and more accustomed to attending “theaters.”

After the novelty of going into a camera obscura just to see an image projected into the room from outside faded, camera obscura operators began connecting their camera obscuras with séances (to also adapt to the late 1800s fascination with the occult). Actors outside the device would perform as “ghosts,” their images where then drawn into the camera obscura to be projected down onto a table top around which people were sitting, holding hands, trying to summon the dead. Mist or smoke was often introduced into the room, along with various scents, vibrations, and sounds to enhance the experience.

This was all quite fake by today’s standards, and even many of the participants at the time were aware of the falseness of the experience, and yet, many still also believed (or wanted to believe) in what they were seeing and hearing. Lumiere Ghosting wants to make specific design reference to this history of the connection between the occult, ghosts, and the “beyond” with the modern manifestations of the projected moving image.

How does globalization serve as a theme for the project?
Globalization has been with us as long as we have been able to travel. It has been limited in scope, however, by the mediums we used for travel and for cross-cultural communication. Global economic markets, the phone and television systems, satellites, and the Internet have vastly accelerated the process. Many cultures now fear they will be leveled into boring, meaningless uniformity by the press of corporate-state driven generic images, concepts, and technologies that seem to be all around us. The Lumire Ghosting Project is interested in this concept of cultural leveling, as well as cultural transmission and interaction through the medium of the moving image, and the effects of globalization are represented or referenced in the physical as well as virtual aspects of the CompuObscura.

What role does transgression play in the Lumiere Ghosting Project and in the CompuObscura?
The desire to participate in an act of transgression, voyeurism, and magic, combined with the suspicion that what you are about to see might change your life is what draws us toward film and to the presentation of the moving image (Dalle). Early film often was shown at festivals or as part of a type of sideshow, and so was always surrounded by the mystique of transgression combined with an element of technological magic. As we have become more accustomed to the film viewing process and as it has become such an ever present part of our culture, modern theaters have become more like vending machines and less like "theaters," doing their best to obliterate the sense of occasion and novelty from the cinematic experience. Many large budget Hollywood movies also drive out a lot of this novelty as they compete to present bigger and louder spectacle. And so, movies often no longer contain magic for many viewers (Helfand). Since televisions live in our homes, as an extra family member, they too have completely lost their sense of novelty and danger. The carnival mystique and the sideshow nature of the CompuObscura's external and internal design, therefore, is an attempt to reunite the image viewing process with transgression, suspicion and magic.

During the early days of the Internet, the sense of being allowed into areas that were previously forbidden was certainly an important lure of the environment and its attendant technologies for the average user (Hoveyda). Even today, people talk about places they have found on the Internet, or stumbled across and return to often, sometimes when they feel that no one is looking. The Internet is vast while also being intensely private; net technology allows millions to publicly view the supposedly private live actions of people living a dorm room which is continually on show through an open web cam, for example. The Internet also allows viewers, surfers and "participants" to continually play with the concepts of identity, secrecy, and transitive persona (on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog). Therefore, the act of viewing images and visiting hard-to-find web sites on the Internet still generates some of the same feelings of transgression and seduction that were a vital part of viewing early films which (like surveillance cameras and web cams of today) allowed viewers to view the events of the everyday without having to actually take part in those events and thereby "reveal" themselves (Levy).

The CompuObscura builds upon the sense of the "unknown" and the "forbidden" in how it captures sections of the hidden Internet and the media stream around us, and puts it on special display, only allowing a few people at a time to see the images inside the device and share the experience the same way camera obscura visitors interacted 100 years ago.

What does it feel like to "experience" the CompuObscura?
The common response to this question is that audience members are not slowed down or interrupted by the technology of the room. Participants are free to move around without any wires or heavy technology attached to them. In tune with our interest in history and early film, the experience of interacting with images in the CompuObscura will be much like the process of viewing images in camera obscuras in the 1800s or like seeing some of the early Lumiere brothers' films when they were first shown—participants come together in a dark room, in a small group, to see something magical, something slightly surreal, they are there to experience something that will stay with them for days and weeks afterward. Audience members don't need to make any special preparation to be part of the event; they don't need to "make" it happen by bringing some technology with them, they just need to be present and have their eyes open. One of the important aspects of being a participant in a camera obscura in the 1800s, or being an audience member at the first showing of a new Lumiere film was the sense of doing something special, something out of the ordinary. In many ways, being at at an early film event was like taking part in a festival or being part of a carnival. Participating in the CompuObscura should make audience members feel that they are doing something a bit cheesy that is also, at the same time, slightly scary and transgressive.

In the final manifestation of the CompuObscura, audience members will slowly find themselves surrounded by darkness and shadows as they move through the device. At first they approach from the outside where the device should look pleasing, charming, festive—like a festival tent or a carnival ride. But as they get closer, they find there are slightly frightening elements in the design, elements in shadow that make visitors suspicious of what they will find if they get closer, but also interested to see what is inside. When participants enter the device they find themselves in a dimly lit pre-staging area, where they are told about the device itself and some of the ideas that go into it. This is similar to the pre-staging area where audience members in a carnival show interact with the Master of Ceremonies, who "sells" them on what they are about to see, gets them excited and eager to see what is just behind the curtain. Once the participants are "hooked" on the story of the device, then are then led into the interaction area which is darker than all the other areas encountered thus far.

Eventually they make out images on a wall and discover that one of those images they can see is a version of themselves, and that "virtual" versions of the participants are interacting with other images in a strange collage of different environments that look like real places, and yet, are also slightly displaced and distorted. The longer the participant stands there, the more she can see on the screen, and the more she is able to control the virtual version of herself in the room that she observes on the screen.

Eventually, the participants are encouraged to leave. One userful way to signal to participants that it is time to leave is to copy a standard motif from cinema—the "film" simply runs out. The CompuObscura therefore signals the end of the experience by simulating the projection of washed out film frames flickering across the screen, until the screen is filled with pure white light. As soon as the film runs out, all the lights in the room go up, the screen vanishes, and people find themselves just standing there, looking at each other, then an exit sign lights up and they leave.

How far along is the project?
The primary development phase of the project is now well underway. We are working on capturing images on the fly then compositing those images for immediate, interactive insertion into a virtual space. We are also learning how to best transfer all this data through an Internet II connection, moving video images from camera, into the Internet, into a distant processing facility, then back for insertion into a virtual space with as much speed as possible.

During the 2004-2005 academic year, we hope to begin the construction on a working model of the CompuObscura. At this point, all the video projection and capture systems will be installed in the CompuObscura, then the entire structure will be connected to the network, and tested with a wide range of participants. After the system is somewhat stable we will then move into integrating video collected from distant CompuObscura device and other moving and still images that we siphon from a revolving collection of Internet locations scattered around the globe.

As the technology for the CompuObscura continues to develop, we envision a number of phases for the device's development and use:

Phase One—In this manifestation, the CompuObscura only has one participant in the device, looking at him/herself on a screen which shows the puppet version of the participant roaming around a virtual environment that we have created in advance. This environment would be someplace "foreign" or quite distant to the participant's location--for example, if the participant is in Los Angeles, the environment on display on the screen would be a plaza in Italy. This is the most basic manifestation of the CompuObscura environment and it is the one we are currently modeling and using as a testing environment. The environment needs to be simple at first so we can perfect a number of low tech methods to track the motion of the participant, then connect that motion tracking information on the fly with the puppet version of the participant. The simplicity of the design also allows us to experiment with various forms of interaction made possible between the motion-tracking-controlled puppet and the virtual environment that contains that puppet.

Phase Two—This phase builds upon phase one, but now allows a number of CompuObscura participants encounter each other in the virtual environment, using the Internet to connect them together. This includes two to three people at a time participating from one CompuObscura, and then two to three people at a time participating from another CompuObscura. All participants, however, are immersed in the same virtual environment in which they can interact with each other in a similar manner to the way that players interact in networked gaming environments. The virtual environment is comprised of real footage taken from a distant location immediately prior to the entrance of the participants into the device, or concurrent with their actual interaction with each other. For example, a camera (or set of cameras) will be set up to monitor a place like a real plaza in Spain and that imagery is then introduced into the CompuObscura environment so the CompuObscura participants can play in that virtual, but also "real" place.
This phase of the device introduces participants to the Lumiere Ghosting Project's ideas about globalization by allowing people from distant locations to "explore" a real environment in real time, with audiences participating from distant locations, using different CompuObscuras as their gateway into the system. The actual development of this manifestation of the technology is still a year or more away, but we are currently developing a number of video demos that show how this system will eventually work.

Phase Three—Once the technical aspects of phase two have been tested and proven reliable, CompuObscura devices will be connected to each other through high-speed Internet II connections, and will be located in different places across the globe. Participants can see each other and interact in a virtual environment (as in phase two above), but now the images and sounds that are used to create the virtual environment and the images that are displayed on the ghost-like screens floating in the central CompuObscura room are siphoned on the fly from live Internet traffic. The siphon points switch, occasionally, from one point on the globe to another. Therefore, for thirty minutes the environment that the CompuObscura participants see is constructed from images and sounds captured on the fly from a siphon connected to an Internet traffic point in St. Petersburg, then thirty minutes later all the images and sounds are siphoned from a collection point outside of Tokyo, then Sydney, then San Francisco, then Amsterdam, then Paris, and so on.

At this point, as designers, we lose a good deal of control over what happens inside these devices as the content continues to shift as the siphon points move around the globe, gathering fairly random images and sounds on the fly. Occasionally there would be convergence points between all the images—for example, if this kind of system had been running on September 11th 2001, most of the images at any siphon point in the world would keep coming back to the World Trade Center Towers as they burned and collapsed. This system would dynamically display the effects of globalization as they play out through media across the planet, in real time. This phase displays one of the major innovations of the CompuObscura device and the Lumiere Ghosting Project as it allows for the interactive viewing and manipulation of electronic imagery gathered, live, from all over the globe.

The design of this Internet siphon is a project that we wish to begin with cooperation from various computer science students and faculty with hopes that we will be able to test this siphon and integrate it into an image display and manipulation system within the next two years.

Phase Four—A final phase of the CompuObscura device depends upon technological innovations in image projection that will eventually happen, but which are far beyond our development capabilities as faculty and students; this phase involves moving the images off the physical screen mounted on the actual CompuObscura wall and moving them into the room itself as a kind of free-form hologram that allows participants, without the use of goggles or gloves, to interact with the images that actually float around them in the room. In this version of the device, participants don't see a puppet version of themselves interacting with other "puppets" on screen—participants are actually immersed in the environment itself just as they would be if they were inside a holodeck. Phase four is clearly many years away, but based on the trajectory projected from phase one through three, a holodeck-like environment is clearly where we're headed with this technology development, pedagogical collaboration, and artistic design process.