021 SPACE - LONGITUDE // LATITUDE
CONCEPT
Space is subjective. Both imaginary and perceptually. And both in time and place. For this assignment, I'd like to play with the concept that along similar lines, space is never the same. Quite literally. In LONGITUDE // LATITUDE, parallel spaces are explored. Visions of everyday street life in five places on earth are simultaneously shown. The scenes are significantly different. In location. In natural surroundings. In cultural context. Yet, there's one thing they share. An axis: all places have the same longitude or latitude.
0 - 10º E Longitude - Jostedalsbreen glacier, Norway // Leiden, The Netherlands // Bologna, Italy // Algiers, Algeria // Lagos, Nigeria.
30 - 40º N Latitude - Los Angeles, USA // Algiers, Algeria // Hebron, West Bank Palestine // Amritsar, Punjab, India // Seoul, South Korea.
I want LONGITUDE // LATITUDE to feel like a window to spaces that are existing simultaneously. Different here, same now. Like a portal to parallel worlds. Peek into the scenes by hovering over the panes within the dashed lines, enlarging that particular window to a specific location somewhere on earth. Spend some time in Leiden, cycle through its friendly streets. Enjoy a serene, pristine natural sight in Norway. Or witness how a street riot in Lagos escalates into a bloody fight.
Switch the axis by pressing the arrow keys. Experience a sparkling L.A. at night. Submerge in the bustle of the community-run free kitchen of Amritsar's Golden Temple, or view a tranquil street in a Seoul. Or witness how Israeli settlers are escorted by military forces in the Palestinian city of Hebron.
Same axis, same geographical "space". Yet, life couldn't be more different. Not even along the same lines.
Voyeurism is allowed. In fact: it is encouraged. Because after all, isn't that what we like to do?
Look away, if you please. You have the choice to veil or unveil what is happening in a different here, same now.
PROCESS
To already explore the theme of the Open Lab Expo, I wanted to address the concept of SPACE in relation to PARALLELS. In brainstorm phase, jotting down sketches and thoughts on paper, I tried to connect both physical and metaphysical space, figuring out how these tie into each other. Formal geographical divisions, time zones, and how life differs along these lines across the globe have always intrigued me, so I wanted to incorporate this.
While freeing up space on my hard drive, I bumped into old video footage I shot on different trips. I figured some had a longitude or latitude in common (0-10º longitude, 30-40º latitude), which I decided to use as a starting point. I shot extra footage in Amsterdam and Leiden, and searched online for street life footage of cities along the same latitude and longitude (Seoul, Lagos, Algiers, Bologna). Finding disturbing street scenes from Lagos triggered me to focus on the harsh contrast of life around the globe. After this, I puzzled with my own footage and the extra footage to create an interesting composition of different places on earth and accompanying life, making sure it portrayed antipoles of quiet, peaceful street life vs. a chaotic, stressed, tensioned one, to enhance the story.
The assembly in openFrameworks took longer than expected. The first layering of video's worked, but the overlapping fragments of the different videos did not provide a smooth transition when hovering over with the mouse pointer. Similarly, the panes only expanded from the drawing point, which for some scenes meant they were not shown completely, or expanded at all, when placed more at the bottom/right side of the screen frame. Only after a while I figured out that only drawing subsections of the videos was possible, which functioned as the clipping mask for the videos I was looking for. The layering of subsections however created some errors due to different file sizes, which gave some nice glitchy effects. The smooth transition from subsection to expanded pane still did not work properly, and fixing it in the code turned out to be a lot extra tailored work. So eventually I decided to clip and compress all videos to the right dimensions for either longitude or latitude mode with Handbrake (video transcoder). This way it was easier to ensure that the right section of the video corresponded with the right placement on the screen, and could expand without visual interruption of the video being enlarged, moved, or restarted.
< fig. 1: Errors in layering videos
Originally I wanted to overlay an outline of a world map on the screen frame, and translate the mouse pointer's coordinates to geographical coordinates. If the user would move the mouse pointer over coordinates of one of the 9 cities, then the video of this location would pop up. The addOns I found to do this (ofxMaps or ofxMercatorMap) however, were both not supported anymore, or I didn't manage to get them functioning. Eventually I found a workaround to translate the mouse coordinates to geographical coordinates, and left the visual presentation of a world map behind. Instead, I decided to let the videos only overlap a few others, so always 2 extra panes with a scene of a different location would be visible. This way the effect of experiencing parallel cities and scenes that are happening simultaneously could be emphasised better. The audio I deliberately left on for the videos, to enhance the contrast between scenes.
Future work - there's a lot of trial and error in this project. Trying to rewrite the code to make it leaner and sturdier was no success, making the current ::draw() section a relative mess. My plan for future work is to make myself more familiar with oF and C++ to improve and structure this into a more sustainable project.
Also, I would like to expand the scenes with more locations along two extra axis (0-10º N latitude with Bogota, Lagos, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Kuala Lumpur, and 60-70º W longitude, with New York City, Cuba, Bogota, Lima, Antartica), for which I already have quite some existing footage. Every arrow key in this case would show a different longitude/latitude then. Also, I would like to emphasise the different time zones here as well: that locations along the same longitude share the same clock time as well, and that for locations along the same latitude there's significant difference in the time of the day. Yet, also for all these locations it is "now" too.
VISUALS AND CODE
Code is available on GitHub.
LATITUDE
LONGITUDE