Ghost Pole Propagator (III), 2024
Ghost Pole Propagator III (2024) revisits a 2007 interactive installation originally developed by Golan Levin for video projection in the cellars of a 13th century castle.
Stick figures are an extremely compact yet exceptionally expressive means of representing the human form. The graphic simplicity of such figures belies their emotional force. By eliminating unnecessary details and reducing visual elements to their absolute essence, stick figures accomplish a powerful, immediately apprehensible and possibly universal communication of human presence, attitude and gesture. Looking around, we find inspirational stick figures in ancient petroglyphs; in children’s drawings; and in the pioneering motion studies of the 19th century French chronophotographer, Étienne-Jules Marey.
An image processing technique called skeletonization (or the medial axis transform) can be used to generate stick figures from the silhouette of any shape. This algorithm is commonly employed in recognizing letters and numbers by some OCR (Optical Character Recognition) systems. However, it produces particularly engrossing abstractions when applied to the silhouettes of people. In the Ghost Pole Propagator installations, these stick figures are computed, in real-time, from the moving silhouettes of passers-by.