Portraiture: Invisible Women
Invisible Women is an interactive video sculpture that portrays the missing female figure in Hollywood movies. Inspired by the Bechdel test, it brings the viewers to question whose stories are told in popular movies and whose are left out. The installation, consisting of four hanging screens, reacts to the viewer when they stand in front of each of the screens. A silent female figure, Miss Andrea, appears inside the scenes from iconic movies, next to aggressive male characters. In some, she is simply staring at the audience, as if to remind them of what is missing in the scenes. In others, she is being covered in cellophane by invisible hands, a violent act trying to remove her from being seen.
Process
Behind-the-scenes of green screen footage.
Sue, Nok, and I worked together to bring this installation to life. We wanted to include scenes from recognizable movies that do not pass the Bechdel test and instead focus on masculinity and violence. After much deliberation, we ended up with A Clockwork Orange (1971), Scarface (1983), The Godfather (1972), and Reservoir Dogs (1992). When a viewer stands in front of one of the screens, a green screen footage of either me or Sue is composited onto the scene in that screen. The installation handles multiple viewers, as shown below.
A timelapse of our breakdown for the installation.
The tracking is done by Kinect v1 on the opposite side of the screens. I was in charge of programming an openFrameworks app that connects to Kinect, allows calibration in the installation space, and plays the appropriate edited footage based on the blob data for each of the four screens. The application runs on a single desktop that connected to four monitors.