Metaverse Makeovers- Level 1

Earlier this year I provided a little technical direction, part of an infinity skinsuit print, and augmented-reality make-up for the first Metaverse Makeovers live performance installation on March 19th 2011 at Fur Salon in Melbourne, Australia, during the Melbourne Fashion Festival. The AR make-up was to be projected onto the performers and react to their movements in unique ways for each of the 3 stages of the performance/evolution.

The work was a collaborative effort between project director Thea Baumann, Brooke Amity-Stamp from BalletLAB,  stylist and contemporary visual artist Alice Lang, contemporary media artist Katharine Neil, documentary film maker Adele Wilkes, and myself.

The footage below is mainly culled from shaky iphone clips of on-site testing of a single effect (as I spent most of the performance in a wire-filled cupboard). See below for a more detailed description of the piece.

METAVERSE MAKEOVERS is a series of live performance installations integrating the latest in live-video processing and augmented reality enhanced projections. Three works will be presented site-specifically in the hyper-colour environments of beauty salons, saunas, and nail parlours across 2011.The FIRST REVEAL will take place within the glamorous and intimate confines of FUR salon – a mirrored prism owned by one of the city’s best dressed stylists Frank Valvo as a featured event in the L’OREAL MELBOURNE FASHION FESTIVAL ’S cultural programming.Over two enchanting nights, Brooke Amity-Stamp of BalletLAB will choreograph and perform within an infinitely refracting augmented reality metaverse created through nascent investigations and hacks with the open-source drivers and 3D scanner system of the Kinects camera – highlighting a burgeoning global hacking movement barely 4 months in existence.METAVERSE MAKEOVERS features a performance installation space, couture, and styling by contemporary visual artist Alice Lang and forms the next collaborative chapter between Lang and project director – Thea Baumann following on from The Last Vestige – a floating junk boat intervention on the Mekong River in Vietnam.METAVERSE MAKEOVERS is an international collaboration between some of the hottest and brightest working in contemporary media arts including Katharine Neil (Paris / Australia) Ex-Atari House and creative director of the infamous Escape from Woomera game, the Augmented Reality explorations of visual artist Ben Ferns (Tokyo), and Adele Wilkes, documentary filmmaker has worked on Beautiful Agony and other art eroticaMETAVERSE MAKEOVERS places contemporary perspectives on beauty, the art of maquillage, and mediated forms of embodiment under a seductive lens.

From artabase.net