A hemisphere of 5,500 white blocks occupies the air, each hanging from above in a pattern which repeats in order and disorder. Pixels play over the physical blocks as an emulsion of digital light within the physical space, producing a habitat for digital forms to exist in our world.



This is “Assembly”, the latest installation by Kimchi and Chips located in Nakdong river cultural centre gallery in Busan, Korea.
A group of external projectors penetrate the volume of cubes with pixel-rays, until every single one of the cubes becomes coated with pixels. By scanning with “structured light“, each pixel receives a set of known information, such as its absolute 3d position within the volume, and the identity of the block that it lives on.



Final systemA camera calibration app written in openFrameworks allows them to determine the intrinsics and extrinsics of the cameras following a chessboard calibration routine. This data can then be used to calibrate the projectors using structured light. They define the calibration tree as a travelling salesman problem, with different calibration routes (e.g. camera A to camera C) being assigned a cost based on the accuracy of the available calibration route, they then evaluate the best calibration tree for each camera and projector, and integrate through the calibration.

Each day a startup script first performs the scan in openFrameworks and then starts the runtime in VVVV.An application first performs the simultaneous capture of structured light on the 5 cameras whilst stepping sequentially through each projector. Following this they triangulate the projector pixels to create a dense mapping between the 2D pixels of the projector and the physical locations of those pixels in 3D space. This map is then stored to disk.

The startup script then loads VVVV which transfers the datamaps to the GPU. They define ‘brushes’ using HLSL shaders which act on the dataset. Different brushes generate different visual effects, for example, some generate density fields which are interpreted as either gradients or isosurfaces. The VVVV graph plays through a script of generative animations and performs systems management.

Kimchi and Chips: Mimi Son and Elliot Woods
Production staff: Minjae Kim and Minjae Park
Mathematicians: Daniel Tang and Chris Coleman-Smith
Videography: MONOCROM, Mimi Son, Elliot Woods | Music by Johnny Ripper
Manufacturing: Star Acrylic, Seoul and Dongik Profile, Bucheon

Kimchi and Chips is Elliot Woods (UK) and Mimi Son (South Korea), a digital media art and design practice based in Seoul which conceives and produces environments, installations and products to enable unexpected and beautiful experiences for people living today.
Their installations focus on the interactions/reactions of people when faced with new media materials, leading them to deconstruct the technical and artistic paradigms of new media techniques and develop them in novel directions.

The result is new ways of merging artificial realities into physical ones in order to create natural interactions between people and the possibilities of the digital world.
Their artistic enquiry focuses on storytelling and the sharing of memories, through which they create private and social experiences through interactions between humans and their artworks.

Kimchi and Chips










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