Swing

Swing, produced with Kristen Tae Jones, moves a simple playground action through a series of translations between physical movement, video, digital image, the internet, and the personal device. Children on a swing were filmed and processed with an RGB echo that separates their movement into overlapping red, green, and blue traces, transforming the familiar motion into a layered digital image. 

A short animated GIF was created from the video and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Swing.gif) where it was made freely available to copy, share, and remix. In the installation, the video was projected with a QR code embedded in the image. Viewers could scan the code with their phones and download their own copy of the GIF, moving the image from a shared projection onto a personal device. The repetitive motion of the swing is mirrored by the endlessly looping GIF while the act of downloading complicates the idea of ownership: the viewer can possess a copy of the image without removing it from the public realm. Swing considers how physical experience becomes digital information and how an image can move between body, screen, network, and individual possession. 2014