Sarah Hatton:::

One More Rack for Peto, 2007, interactive multimodal environment

two students on a museum field trip collaborate while playing One More Rack for Peto

One More Rack for Peto, 2007, in collaboration with Metro Arts High School students Liz Allen, John Adams and Victor Rollinger, Arizona State University Art Museum

One More Rack for Peto is an interactive installation that uses the SMALLab tracking, visual, and audio technology so to create a collaborative multimedia digital, visual and sonic poetry collage. It was created for the ASU Art Museum’s Connectivity Stage I Interlab which is a project that engages local artists with local area art students in the creation of original artworks in response to American pieces from the museum’s collection. During the Spring Semester of 2007, five SMALLab team members lead their own group of three to five students from the Phoenix Metropolitan Arts Institute. The groups chose the artwork they were most interested in. My group chose The Rack by John Frederick Peto which is a trompe l’oeile painting created during the time of the Second Industrial Revolution. Peto often painted his letter racks which are much like today’s cork boards, and in his paintings he reveals his personal and treasured possessions, much of them being letters, newspapers and books covered with writing. We decided to make our own digital rack containing textual objects as well using videos and drawings. The final piece contains seven digital objects that can change size, rotation, and image. These artifacts can then be moved around the space using two glowballs. Depending on how the participant moves their body, the digital artifacts move around and thus form a new collage.

Tools, scripts, software, equipment and ephimera:

Max/Msp/Jitter; Premiere; custom Javascripts, video, stop motion animation, and audio; the SMALLab system

Special Thanks: David Birchfield, Aaron Cuthbertson, Chris Todd, Brandon Mechtley, Huan Jin, the SMALLab team, Aaron Abbott, Metro Arts Video Department

Watch a video of Digital Poetry, a video I used clips of in One More Rack for Peto:

Digital Poetry from Sarah Hatton on Vimeo.