Staff Research Profiles

Artefact

Allen and Overy LLB world headquarters, City of London

This work is one of the first permanent large scale interactive digital media artworks to be commissioned. In achieving this new software and hardware systems have had to be created and configured in order to ensure reliability and forward maintenance. Habeas Corpus is composed as three related elements in three different spaces within the new corporate world headquarters of a large multinational corporation. Employing video surveillance and identity tracking technologies and situated in the heart of the City of London, one of the most surveilled locations on Earth, the work explicitly engages with its context. The title of the work puns on the legal concept of habeas corpus, where legal action can only be enacted against an individual when they are physically present. the term literally means "bring me the body". This legal precept, that underpins criminal law in the UK and much of the world, has been put under threat by governments seeking to control populations under the guise of a "war on terror". In this artwork video imagery of people in the vicinity of the work is acquired, matted in realtime and then montaged such that they then see themselves life size, in a 3D space along with the last 50 or so other people to have engaged with the work. People entering, passing through and leaving the building are thus both spectator and spectacle. This work has required the development of novel software systems that enables the realtime automatic video acquisition of people and the realtime matting and montaging of this data into a 3D timelapsed composite animation that is then video projected on a large scale in the space where the acquisition occurred. The effect is of an architectural environment capable of visually remembering and replaying recent human activity within its confines.

01/01/2007

Greyworld, Alan Davies

International Art Consultants

permanent large scale artwork for Allen and Overy LLB world headquarters, City of London

pending