Fugitive II

Fugitive II is the second iteration of the interactive digital video installation Fugitive (I), developed in 1996-7 at CMU, Pittsburgh USA and ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany by Simon Penny, with the assistance of Jamie Schulte and Andre Bernhardt.

The question ‘what is Fugitive II’ may be answered from two directions. As a piece of interactive media research, Fugitive (I+II) attempt to move beyond a simplistic state-machine model of interactivity in which raw instantaneous location of the user triggers events. Fugitive responds to the ongoing behaviour of the user.

Fugitive (I+II) attempt to remove the levels of abstraction and encoding common to most interactive paradigms. Users interact in Fugitive with no special clothes or headgear, no input devices and no training. Fugitive responds to the natural embodied expression and dynamics of human users. It models a more convivial kind of human-computer interaction. Theoretically, Fugitive has much in common with situated, embodied and phenomenological critiques of conventional Artificial Intelligence approaches.

The imagery in Fugitive II speaks to the conflicted nostalgia of the expatriate. The movement of the user undoes the original cinematography: for instance, the moving projected image puts the frames of a pan back on the wall at angles relative to each other that correspond to the original arc of the camera. In so doing, FugitiveII falteringly, fragmentally, reconstructs a virtual recreation of a place, only to be disrupted, deconstructed, or to collapse, due to user movement. FugitiveII speaks to the impossibility and the folly of dwelling in memory.