skateboarding VR test

this is only a quick test run of what I'm hoping to do for my final studio piece. Ideally I could use 4 television monitors arranged with one directly in front of the viewer, one near the viewers feet, and one on either side of the viewer in their peripheral vision. I'd like to film a variety of skateboarding styles (4 times over) to give the audience a different experience. The VR of riding a skateboard through a skatepark, for example, with all the people getting in the way etc. is very different than what one would experience skating downhill, or perhaps skating downtown at night...the hardest thing to achieve in this is mentally noting what path I have first taken on my skateboard so that the remaining 3 camera angles can sync up.

the wall

In an affort to get a better feeling for what it would be like to have our campus split by a wall, I placed a track in google maps and elevated it a bit to make it more 3-d.

It's hard to wrap my head around the idea of a divided country and even with seeing SFSU divided like that it's hard to understand the magnitude of this separation. It reminds me of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, two peoples very much the same but politically divided to a point where the two halves of the country are slowing each other down rather than helping progression.

immersive virtual reality

For my studio piece I'd like to create a skateboarding virtual reality installation piece using multiple monitors to create the sensation of actually riding on a skateboard for anyone who walks into it. It will require me filming myself skating from m POV, I'll shoot each run four times (camera in front, back, and on both sides) Ideally the screens would be angled correctly and close enough so that the viewer would be able to turn their head left to right and see what I would see.

digital art

Research

I'm very interested in the way space can be manipulated to result in different types of spaces. For example, this first photo is a simple water run-off that has been slightly modified to be far more fun to skate, it reminds me of the subversive art of Banksy where the more slight the modification in the piece, the more dramatic the effect is...


I recently spent time with Jeff King who stars in "Built to Shred" a tv show about spot-modification on Fuel TV. In the time I spent with Jeff I saw him transform junk metal into skate-obstacles, pouring concrete to permanently change a space, he even brought in snowblowers to turn his southern california home into a ski resort complete with jumps off of the roof. When Jeff or any other skater look at space, we look at it for potential in a way that someone who doesn't skateboard will never see. A simple swimming pool or jersey barrier between lanes on the freeway are pure potential...

skate runs

steepness of SF streets

One of my ideas for a mapping piece would be a type of map designed to look like a map of runs at a ski resort of steep hills in san francisco. this will require identifying "runs" through the city that link up (making runs that are MUNI-accessible would give the skater the opportunity to use the hill just like a ski run with a lift back to the top)

this is the steepness of one of the runs that I skate down often...