Extinguishing Bodies

A light source becomes a life force in Extinguishing Bodies, an interactive installation that encourages participants to consider humanity’s impact on other lifeforms. Extinguishing Bodies makes use of Adobe Flash, Adobe Illustrator, and arts engineering toolkits Processing and Arduino. Animated creatures are projected onto a surface embedded with photoresistors, sensors that detect light. When blocked, the creatures panic and scream in proportion to how little light there is. The instillation takes place in a hallway, oriented in such a way that passersby must obstruct the projector’s light if they wish to pass through. If the light is totally blocked out, the creatures disappear.

Animation, Interaction Design, Programming
Bobblebird (left), Scardeybat (top), Orclops (left)
Video demonstrating Extinguishing Bodies' physical installation, which involves a projector and a custom interacitve projection surface positioned in a hallway. Big thanks to my friend Maddie for starring in this video.
Video showing off the different states of the digital projection. Each character has six states: idle, worried, three intensities of panicked screaming, and death. The creatures were animated in Adobe Flash. Big thanks to my friends Maddie and Michael for providing the voices of Scardeybat and Orclops respectively. I was Bobblebird. 
The projection surface was lasercut from an Adobe Illustrator file. Attached to the projection surface and the wall via velcro is a custom wooden housing for the Arduino curcuit, which runs the light sensors and tells the projector what to dispay through a program written in Processing. Getting the projection and the projection surface to line up was a huge undertaking, and required a few on-site last-minute tape-related adjustments.
Early concept sketch. Intitally I planned to have the creatures react to light sensors placed around them, but this created a lot of unnecessary complexity, so I cut down the number of light sensors and placed them on the characters instead. 
My favorite frames of animation for Bobblebird, Scardeybat, and Orclops.
This project was supported in part by funding from the Carnegie Mellon University Frank-Ratchye Fund For Art @ the Frontier
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