The Color Project at IFP Media Center by MPC New York
Created by MPC New York in collaboration with artist Thompson Harrell, ‘The Color Project’explores narratives through colour, line, and form found in geographic satellite imagery. Utilising Google Earth together with custom software, the install spans over 27 HD screens pointing locations of the films that have been produced by IFP.
The formal motifs of each film location are explored in the form of a grid of 162 globes. In beautifully synchronicity, each view first plunges from space, coming to a stop on a single color in the landscape, creating a place-specific mosaic. Hopping from one location to the next, the piece reveals the character of Bogotá, Colombia (Maria Full of Grace), Cleveland, New York City, Florida (Stranger than Paradise), Vietnam and Virginia (The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers), among others, while also drawing attention to the contrast between the locations.
The team created a suite of sampling applications using node.js and MongoDB for storing, organising, and analysing over 60,000 colours that were collected. They created both an automated bot that combed each location for hours, as well as a web application that allowed them to hand curate location-specific architectural details and colours.
Using openFrameworks and Awesomium (an off-screen browser renderer), they built an automated sampling and recording interface to the Google Earth API and created a library of over 1,620 sequences, each spanning 1 minute and 30 seconds. Finally, Python and Nuke were utilised to composite the final five sequences, each containing 324 individual videos to make up the mosaic.
