Mike Jutan's World: Matthew Parrott: Pas de Deux performance art

I am sooooo proud of my friend/bro/confidant/general mentor/fellow Lucas homey Matt Parrott and his great work last night. He was working in collaboration with Urban Art Farm (http://www.urbanartfarm.org) and the San Francisco Ballet along with other Bay Area Ballet Companies to create a performance art piece. It was really ammmaazing.

He wrote a real-time shader on his MacBook using the Quartz Composer language. This real-time shader takes live input from a DVI video camera feed and sends it to the GPU card to be processed. Then an image is outputted and projected onto the screen.

The performance part of the art was that the "input" to Matt's real-time shader was ballet dancers! So this was very very interesting and really an amazing use of technology for art. As a certain visionary has said, "The technology drives the art and the art drives the technology." I hope John Lasseter would be proud. :)

Anyway, it was amazing. The ballet dancers danced on the stage, and the camera projected their movements behind in a form similar to the work that legendary Canadian Animator Norman McLaren did at the National Film Board of Canada in his famous work (of the same name), Pas de Deux. For this Norman McLaren used an optical printer to create effects somewhat like what Matt has created in real-time. It is an exciting time for computer animation, and this is the kind of collaboration between art and science that is really exciting and interesting and actually possible now due to recent advances in hardware and graphics card technology. Amazing.

Anyway, the images and video speaks for itself.

If you'd like to see more of Matt's work, or check out Urban Art Farm, check it out here.

Matthew Parrott: http://www.atabet.com
Urban Art Farm: http://www.urbanartfarm.org