Mitchell sez,
A Dream of Pastures is an interactive art installation I built along with Brad Hindson, an architect at KPMB here in Toronto. It's going to be exhibited on the exterior of the Art Gallery of Ontario for Toronto's Nuit Blanche All-Night contemporary art festival.
At the core of the projector are six 100-W metal halide lamps, shining through six images of a horse, laser-cut out of oak plywood. The series of circular shutters between the lights and the cut-outs are set up so that only one light at a time is unmasked, allowing it to shine through and cast the image on the wall. So as the shutters rotate, the images are cast in sequence.
The rotation of the shutters is powered by a generator mounted onto an adjacent exercise bicycle. And, of course, by getting on the generator bicycle, the viewer casts his shadow onto the image of the horse, so that he becomes the horseback rider. A circuit on the front of the bike smoothes out the power coming out of the generator, limiting the voltage to the machine so the shutters don't spin too quickly, and also sending the proper voltage and current to a cassette player on the front of the bike (it plays music on the headphones when you pedal) and a device that makes the viewer's shadow flicker in sync with the horse.
(Thanks, Mitchell!)
