The Making Of

Under the Greenlights

Yellowknife and my seasonal relationship with light Light exhibition in Aga Khan Northern Lights & Liminality Light Projections & Azure Kinect TouchDesigner & Photomosh

Project Statement:

Under the Greenlights is an exploration of the northern lights and liminality. Using the point cloud depth-mapping technologies of the Microsoft Kinect Azure, the node-based visual environment of Touch Designer, and the front-end interfaces of OBS and Photomosh, the participants become the spiritual subjects under the green light interactive visuals.

Liminality is a core theme Ivan has gone through over the past decade, basking in the emotional “in-betweens” of moving from city to city, parent to parent, and teens to twenties. This, alongside his ever-changing relationship with light growing up in Yellowknife, solidified his desperation for summer’s eternal sunsets - especially during winter’s 3 PM nighttime. Despite winter’s hardships, its northern lights serve as a reminder that light prevails in complete darkness. The stories of the Dene and Cree of the territories say that these lights in the sky are the spirits of those who passed, dancing to communicate with loved ones on earth (Legends of the Aurora, https://spectacularnwt.com/story/legends-of-the-aurora/). Under these greenlit, passed, spirits, we experience an emotional and dreamy sense of in-between of our current bodies on this earth, and what will be our future auras above us.

This installation does not expect its participants to understand the significance of their own auroras or the bigger picture of the northern lights. Rather, the hope is to convey the otherworldly experience of our northern lights tby inviting participants to interact with the in-between of their current bodies and their aurora counterpart. Whether it is experienced as one passes by, dances, or tells others of this piece, Ivan hopes that participants can share their expressions of light, create their own artistic narrative, and let the participatory nature of light speak for itself.

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Previous Iterations & Process Photos:

Initial brainstorming: goals, how to measure success, importance...

Initial brainstorming: originally, UTGL was going to have a day/night cycle on a dual-screen format, but was proven to be too compelex.

Initial brainstorming : possible setup, materials needed, and “opposite version”... How will the visuals be projected? From what angle?

Initial Touch Designer setup: Colour + Point Cloud mesh was scrapped becasue colour range is inferiour to b/w range, and there was an exclusion overlap that limited the overall depth range.

Initial setup with Touch Designer, OBS, and Photomosh

The projector/screen setup: Kinect Azure -> Monitor 1 w/ Touch Designer preview output, Monitor 2 w/ Photomosh and OBS webcam casting from Monitor 1

Monitor 1 live screen recorded onto OBS as a virtual webcam, routing into Photomosh live visuals on Monitor 2

Photomosh, custom preset I made to create the aurora visuals (AURORAv2) from the b/w point cloud preview from Touch Designer. Each space is different, and tweaking the Color Correction brightness and contrast is required

AURORAv1 preset, this version had too many grainy, sharp vertical strokes and had lots of nosie.

Initial setup vlog (unmute)

Photomosh visual output wrt Touch Designer visual output