New York #2 (detail)
©2001,
Michael O'Rourke
A
video camera, hidden within the mural wall, picks up video of the passersby
as they look at and walk past the mural. Their imagery is combined in
real-time with pre-existing still imagery and displayed on a screen embedded
within the mural. Part of the still imagery is a line (orginally done
as a charcaol drawing) which continues from the top of the mural down
through the video screen and to the bottom of the mural.
The live video of the passersby is deliberately pixelated. As the pixelated
video is keyed through other imagery, it creates graphic patterns which
echo the hand-drawn drawings of the mural imagery. The squares of the
pixelization process echo the square tiles used to construct the
mural, as well as the rectangles of imagery within the mural.
In the print version of this composition, the live-video imagery is replaced
by a similar still image.