Airhead
This piece was created during the Spring 2021 semester for my Interactive Media Arts class on Video Art.
Inspired by the exaggeration of emotions in German Expressionism, Airhead is a performance piece that forces the user to face a visualization of the mounting anxiety they faced while in isolation and excessive self-reflection this past year. I worked on this project with Isabelle Rieken and Faith Zeng.
Group Selfie!
For this project, we began by testing both the physical fabrication and the Isadora sketch to make sure both could work independently. Testing the balloon included finding the right air pump, and timing the pop to make sure our Isadora sketch would sync up. We also had to figure out a few technical things such as how to keep the balloon pump blowing up on its own, how the balloon stayed attached, and how to hide the pump.
Final Look of the Isadora File
As for setup, we had the subject sitting in a chair, facing the balloon and a camera on a tripod directly beneath it. Above the subject, we hung a projector from the ceiling using a tripod arm. Beneath the subject, we had a speaker playing relaxing piano music. Behind the subject, Faith was manning the computer with Isadora to make sure everything was running smoothly, as well as initiating the start of the performance. Behind Faith, I was stationed with an extension cord, which was run to the balloon pump, and plugged the cord into the wall at Faith's cue. The balloon pump was stationed inside a black box that we built through a laser cutter, and was rigged to automatically be pushed down to blow air as soon as it received power. Once the balloon popped, we programmed the Isadora sketch to immediately stop the video output and the music playing, and it was able to stop through a simple audio-in watcher, waiting for the input on Faith's computer to reach a certain level.
We had a few errors throughout this process, including one right when we felt we were about to end the project as a whole. During the trial run, the sequence of events seemed to be running smoothly, up until the air pump began stuttering its air flow, causing the balloon to never pop. We think the pump may have been overheating, but are not confident in those findings. Thankfully, we were able to capture the piece (first video above) right before the air pump completely died on us, probably from overheating. You can watch that failed run below.
Overall, we ended up happy with the result, and could potentially work with this in further detail down the road. As for music, my dear friend, Sam Gryzwa, also known as Isle'r, was kind enough to let us use one of his new singles "Through the Glass" as our calming piano music. You can find Isle'r on Spotify here, or on Instagram as @isler_nyc.
