Shadow Foxing
We're planning to have Nigel Wrench, or a shadow of him, live from Trafalgar Square on PM this evening. He writes:
"Take a look at this....
"...part of Under Scan by the Mexican-American artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, being installed as I write in Trafalgar Square, and available to experience each evening for the next ten days.
"The idea is that when you walk through a spotlight, a video of someone else is projected into your shadow.
"Mr Lozano-Hemmer installed a version of this work in Leicester, Northampton, Derby and Nottingham in 2006, when these pictures were taken.
(All images by Antimodular Inc [Copyright Rafael Lozano-Hemmer], courtesy ArtReach and East Midlands Development Agency)
"The promoters say the Trafalgar Square version will be 'the world's largest interactive video installation', and that the area will be flooded with '110,000 lumens of light', though I'm not sure how bright a 'lumen' might or might not be.
"They say there are up to 1,500 video portraits available, some taken during the East Midlands run, others filmed at Tate Modern in London this autumn.
"The art world regards Mr Lozano-Hemmer as currently 'hot'.
"So hot that Dasha Zhukova, curator of Moscow's new Centre for Contemporary Culture, commissioned him to make a seven-metre spiral of lights as the centrepiece of her gallery's opening last June.
"At the opening party, those outside the art world may have recognised among the guests Ms Zhukova's consort, the oligarch and football enthusiast Roman Abramovich.
"If you can't make it to Moscow but happen to be in London soon, there are two other (free) opportunties to see Mr Lozano-Hemmer's work: at the Barbican Centre and at a commercial gallery called the Haunch of Venison, which is owned by the auctioneers Christie's.
"The artist should be in Trafalgar Square live on PM with me this evening, when he and I will be trying the piece out, and attempting to make it work on the radio.
"Or did you experience it in the East Midlands two years ago?"
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A typical projector for a school whiteboard is likely to be 2000 lumens - so I'd say 110,000 is quite a lot.
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Gives a whole new meaning to me and my shadow
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"I'm not sure how bright a 'lumen' might or might not be"
It is not bright at all. Brightness is the intensity of a light. That is just how much there is.
So we need to know the floor size of the Trafalgar Square version to see how "thinly" it is distributed.
Then it might be less that evenly distributed so the final answer is:
It does not matter! Go have fun!
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I read a column in The Indy today about a man who had sex with a woman on a computer game. Can you have simulated sex with one of these shadow pictures?
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Wikipedia's definition is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumen_(unit)
I'm still not entirely sure what a lumen is, but comparing JustFloating's comment to the article, although the display might use up 110,000 lumens, it's lux (lumens / area) is much smaller.
Apparently, the total area of the square is 110m x 110m, so if you ignore bits you can't walk on (e.g. Nelson's column!), let's go for somewhere between 90x90 (8100 sq m) and 100x100 (10,000 sq m).
So we're looking at about 11 and 14 lux - not much at all, then!
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DMcN, thinking of the Indy -- would any of the other papers have reported a story about pirates being stopped by the Navy by talking with a pirate who was saving up to get his third wife, and justifying killing and looting as the way he could achieve this ambition? Sometimes I *worry* about that paper!
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C_G 6, I blame it on the new editor and all that color.
I emailed a columnist (BV) and asked him if he was blackmailing somebody there as he had a column neary every day in a different section of the paper.
He said that he would blackmail to write less.
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Ooo-er
It's all a bit avant-garde.
First we learn that Tinkerbell SPEAKS and has taken over the "talking-clock" now, this...
Mind you, it seems as with many things, the "Fab-Four", got there first:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/nov/16/paul-mccartney-carnival-of-light
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