Aoml (Art of Making Love) is a school project completed in 2005. It is a installation resulting from my research into encoding video frames into single images. Encoding/decoding part of the project will be presented in DEV part of the site.

Background

“Making love – sexual activities (often including sexual intercourse) between two people”
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/making%20love – 1st page on the google

Producers of XXX movies, beside of showing the act of making love as pure animalistic fulfilling of human sexual needs, they all also tend to use the same line of “events” for each scene as if there is some strict rule defining what occurs when in this act. Angles of shooting are also deprived of any need for viewer’s imagination. It is shown as something it’s not supposed to be… routine!

Inspiration

Project was inspired by Jim Campbell’s “Illuminated average” series.
“Illuminated Average #1, Hitchcock’s Psycho is concerned with the compression of time in a single image. Campbell scanned every single frame of Hitchcock’s film and generated a single new image from the result. Placing all of the frames on top of each other, he created an image that contains all of the film’s visual data.”
– http://www.zkm.de/futurecinema/campbell_werk_psycho_e.html

Installation

The installation takes place in a room 3 by 3 meters, with 9 canvas prints hanging on the walls. On the pedestal in the middle of the room, the visitor can find the interface to interact with hanged pictures. The user interface consists of an encapsulated tablet-PC with camera on the back side. With the screen in hands, the visitor can walk freely through the room and by looking through the screen, discover new layer of information hidden within the pictures.

Because of the nature of the triple-x as a movie genre, it was possible to compress the length of the whole movie into 9 images. Each scene is reduced to several frames, which are encoded into one image of a special aesthetic, so that it contains the whole scene’s visual data, including the embedded movement. In the installation, the same images are captured with a camera mounted on the back side of the screen, and with a use of an algorithm, in real-time processed and decoded. As a result, we get back extracted the whole motion, scene, movie.

The visitor can choose own line of scenes, timing, duration, with possibility to permute scenes through over 360 000 combinations. New form of movie grammar is created through non-linearity of time and by disconnecting shoots from any particular place or person, with the emphasis on kinesthetic part of the act. The Images are printed on canvas to associate them with paintings and their purity and uniqueness. That’s what every making love should be like… unique… its own piece of art.

Exhibition

Exhibition in Freiraum, MuseumsQuartier, Vienna, Austria