By generating an artificial shadow which grows out of the foot, and by changing the colors and the shapes of it, we attempt to create a gap between the body and the shadow, to rise awareness to the body, and to expand the feeling of body to help create bodily expressions.

Shadow Awareness Ⅱ: Dual 2010

The media technology so far is only targeted for the performers on stage, and not for the presence of the audiences. This kind of design can not achieve the sharing of expression between the performer and the audiences, because it does not let the performers to express with the audiences, or to express with the audiences on their mind. We are working on this problem by developing an inclusive expression media space that includes the audiences. To be more specific, we have developed a shadow media space with the slit screens and a media that wraps up the whole stage, along with the performers. Also, we have introduced the shadow media system with the slit screens at the Genoa Science Festival that was held at Genoa, Italy in 2010, in the expression media piece “Shadow Awareness II:Dual 2010”, which ended in success.
Slit screens are the screens where beltlike pieces of cloths are lined up with spaces between each of them. With the slit screens enabling the projection onto the both sides of the screen with two projectors, and also enabling the performers going through the screen, we have succeeded in strengthening the spatial expanse feeling and the sense of unity between the performer and the audiences.

Designing of the Shadow Media Space Focused on the Background

In this study, we have designed a shadow media expression space by focusing on the background that surrounds the body, to assist the connection between the performers up stage and the stage itself to the audiences and the atmosphere around them. To be more specific, we have developed a background media which combines the body figure with the background by changing the image projected as the background according to how the body moved. We have also developed a system that projects the media onto all over the expression space by using projection mapping as a new way to project this background media. And with this, we have developed a system to remotely communicate the background and the shadow media between remote locations, and by using this, tried to assist co-creation between these locations.

The Assistance of the Creation of “Ba” from the Embodied Media Circulation of Shadow and Sound

We have been working on the development of the sound media that goes through double residual shadow. This sound media has a distinctive feature, where the double-sound is created from focusing on the relation between inner and outer residuals of the residual shadow. However, because the shadows are not changed by the sound, there was a problem where there was no action being made from the sound to the body. To solve this problem, we tried to create a circulation between the shadow and the sound of the embodied media. To be more specific, we developed a system that circulates between the shadow and the sound of the embodied media by creating the sound media from the double residue shadow’s relation and transforming the shadow media by using the predictive information gained by using autoregressive model on the sound.