Shadow Exposed

A lo-fi interactive art piece that allows people to cast shadows and reveal hidden layers

Artistic Director | Judy K Suh
Technical & Logistics Director | Eddie Yang
Installation | Together

Shadow Exposed was created for the annual light art festival iLight Singapore. The theme of this 2019 Bicentennial edition, marking the 200th anniversary of Stamford Raffle’s landing in Singapore, was “Bridges of Time”. In response, we created a piece that integrated Singapore’s historical photos while encouraging viewers to interact using their shadows.

This project is a physical manifestation of double-exposure photography. Two layers of video projections are overlapped on each other: a layer of Singapore’s archive photos, and a layer of silhouetted people on white background. When a viewer stands in front of a projector, which is situated on the ground, s/he casts a shadow and conceals a layer of video. But their shadow is then filled with the image in the other video layer. In effect, when people stand in front of the projected canvas, they see historical photos of Singapore in the shapes of their own shadows. This sounds much more complicated than it really is. In reality, it was an intuitive play, immediately engaging passerby’s of all age.

Shadow Exposed was created in collaboration with Edward Yang of Visual Feeder. It was displayed outdoors at Marina Bay during the month of February in 2019, alongside 31 other works from all over the world.

This project took an enormous amount of R&D, a.k.a. trial & error. We tested countless versions of content, screen material, mounting methods, projector layout and networking options.

Even after many testing and confirming, a lot of work had to be readjusted once we were on site in Singapore. External forces (i.e. insane amount of wind, a temporary theme park behind us producing a lot of light) presented many challenges. Making it fail-proof was important so it could be seamlessly operated by the staff once we left.

Process

The content went through many iterations. It wasn’t enough to make it look amazing on screen, but we had to make many adaptations to account for the interactivity, the very large scale (38ft wide), technical limitations and the blending of projections. The core idea of silhouetted people and historical images, however, remained constant.

Pre-Visualization renders