Housebound is a stereoscopic installation that uses motion stabilization and geometry recovery in order to place narrative text into the illusory depth of subjective hand-held camera shots.
Housebound tells the story of a woman trying reconstruct the eccentric thoughts of her deceased lover by “reading” the spaces of his now mostly vacant apartment. We gaze out his windows at the sky and at the bustling streets of upper Manhattan; we inspect his chair, his desk, and his bedframe; we scrutinize a light fixture and outlet, a sink and a stovetop, a drinking glass and a spoon, an intercom and a hallway.
The stereoscopic depth of Housebound is of film-like resolution, shot with paired cameras streaming uncompressed hd video directly to two computers. To get a fuller sense of the image quality:
You may preview a representative still at higher resolution, bearing in mind that it is only half the resolution of the real image — and that since this is only the image for the left eye, the actual resolution of the piece is in fact double-hd.
If you have a pair of standard anaglyph glasses (with red and blue-green lenses), you may preview the stereoscopic depth of this shot, bearing in mind that this kind of preview sacrifices color to achieve its illusion of depth.
In the actual installation, viewers will peer through two peepholes so that each eye is presented with one half of the stereo image, which your mind combines with the other half to achieve full-color 3d depth.
The soundtrack of Housebound has a piano tentatively piecing together one simple melody. The length of notes – with their partial decay to silence – determines the length of each shot, a tight interlocking of image to sound. The piano tones are those of a particular piano, with all its idiosyncrasies; each note recorded by Terry Pender from several distances — for example, some microphones were placed very close to the strings while others were put in an adjoining room.
note: Housebound is the first in a series of works-in-progress entitled Depth .
Venue + credits
