C O M M O N
T H R E A D
- Brien Colwell, @xcolwell
Common Thread is a distributed sculpture that links audio visual moments from participants' Android phones into a single linear thread with the properties of physical space - continuous, always present, with participants occupying roughly the same amount of room. The linear thread creates a narrative that equally unifies all the participants, juxtaposed with the nonlinear and asymmetric online narrative in which it exists. The thread winds continuously through each participants' screen, uniformly adding and transmitting moments from one participant to the next. The project will explore 1. a zoomed in view on part of the thread, where the screen is moving along the thread, playing video and audio it encounters, and occasionally capturing new moments from the front-facing camera and mic; 2. a zoomed out view of the entire thread, providing an overview of the complete narrative; 3. a mounted installation of multiple devices in the zoomed-in view, to create perceptual continuity in a permanent physical space, like multiple windows into an aquarium. I hope the emotional effect of the common thread will be similar to an aquarium, calming and hopefully, comforting.
Common Thread on the Play Store
This project is inspired by previous explorations where I attempted to link space into single movements [1, 2]. Visually the sculpture will resemble a rainbow, with segments of the rainbow composed of short video loops. The video loops will be processed to a gestalt form, to reflect by not perfectly capture the video, into a more primal form, inspired by my work in Enter & Re-Exit [3].
Random Walk in Multiscale (2010)
Euler Walk through a Cube (2008)
Enter & Re-Exit (2008), gestalt image processing example
