The installation art I have been working on since last month have been installed. You can now see it in action in Hong Kong Book Fair from 20-26 July at Hong Kong Exhibition and Convention Centre, inside the booth of CityU Press (1D-A28).
Kinect(OpenNI) is used for motion tracking, running a program I wrote in C++ with openFrameworks. Collision and soft body simulation is done by Bullet.
Artist statement
“Between the lines/書中” is an interactive installation that visualizes the famous Chinese proverb “書中自有黃金屋”, which literally means “A book holds a house of gold”.
Viewers can go into a 3D virtual space where Chinese literature sentences suspended all over the place. By waving and touching, the Chinese characters will be transformed into gold. And with enough golden characters, a house of gold will be constructed.
The Chinese sentences are extracted from The Four Books(四書), which are the authoritative texts of Confucianism(儒家) in China written two thousand years ago. They are displayed in both traditional Chinese calligraphy and modern fonts, in the meaning of those classic texts are relevant to society independent of time.
The interaction is a visual representation of the joyful and rewarding experience of reading books. There can be multiple viewers interact with the installation at the same time, which aligned to the fact that book reading can be a social process, where readers can share thoughts, recommend books to each other.
