Blue Screen Website

http://b-l-u-e-s-c-r-e-e-n.net/streamscape/

This website is a must see. A friend sent me the link and was interested to see what I thought. The concept behind the website is fairly easy to explain, however, the programming that must have been used to achieve this is far from easy and out of my league so I will have that up to you to decipher.

The concept is to produce a hybridization of images from 15 web cams scattered all over the world. Every minute the streams from all of these cameras are captured on a server and then incorporated with the help of a very progressive dissolve, resulting in the landscape visible on this site. The aim of the website is to give birth to a landscape that lives from the inside, an inhabited landscape, which has a particular life form and is nourished from the flow that inhabits it. This landscape is timeless or at least not subjected to a specific timeframe, and shares some of its time with the viewer, the time that it lives.

The web designers have attempted to create such landscapes by substituting the image with the stream from live web cams. A still image by definition fixes time, a moving image captures, contracts or extends it; live display of camera stream has for its part the particularity of placing the viewer and what is to be seen in the same timeframe: the time in which we are living. The landscapes one is able to see are composed with the help of a special program, which was specially developed for this project and devoted to the manipulation of this sort of image stream from distant web cams. The resulting landscapes originate from the re-composition and live hybridisation of the stream from sources located in different places all over the world. What is projected and what we observe is no longer a singular, immobile, stored image, but a transitory state resulting from the orchestration of a multitude of streams, a sort of network of fragmented landscapes, rendering and simultaneously mixing distinct views of spaces sent by the web cams. This kind of mental landscape incessantly rebuilds itself from views that arrive instantaneously from different distant places and spaces.

In essence this is an interactive piece of media that allows the viewer to become part of a global cycle. Can you see this concept becoming something that will be developed further, I think I can.