Hand From Above
Hand From Above: Big Screen Liverpool
Chris O’Shea’s Hand From Above encourages us to question our normal routine when we find ourselves rushing from one destination to another. Inspired by Land of the Giants and Goliath, we are reminded of mythical stories by mischievously unleashing a giant hand upon an outdoor LED video screen with audio broadcast. What if humans weren’t on top of the food chain?
Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.
A joint co-commission between Liverpool City Council and AND: Abandon Normal Devices Festival of New Cinema and Digital Culture, Hand From Above launched upon the the Big Screen Liverpool during September 09. It has subsequently appeared upon the Big Screen Cardiff and is currently on a UK-wide tour of the BBC / London 2012 Live Sites network.
Hand from Above was built using openFrameworks & openCV, an application framework designed for creative coding written in C++ and which runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. For this project, the on-screen camera is linked to a computer that runs the software and then outputs to the screen. Unsuspecting pedestrians are then tickled, stretched, flicked or removed entirely in real-time by a giant deity.
The software picks a person based on their proportions and how apart they are from other people, tracking the blob over time using optical flow. If the giant hand removes, flicks or shrinks a person, first it rubs out that person from the live video using the background reference pixels.
The tracked person is then redrawn over the top in relation to what the hand is doing, i.e. being picked up, or flicked out to the left of the screen. When the hand shrinks a person it redraws them into the video at half scale. If too large a crowd has gathered to watch the hand resorts to tickling people, selecting at random.
Hand From Above: Big Screen Cardiff
Thousands of observers and participants, particularly the elderly, families, children and those of foreign origin were able to engage without the need for specific phone handsets or a more detailed understanding of the technology involved. Fun, immediate and playful, shoppers jostled and whooped to attract the attention of the unknown (actually automated) operator.