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Entertainment

Generative Video Depicts Flow Of Traffic As Trippy Trails Of Movement

Ursula Damm’s Transit shows the ebb and flow of trams and cars from the commuter’s perspective.

"transits" - generative video installation from resoutionable on Vimeo.

Most people’s daily commute is a pretty boring affair: get to train station, get on train, ride to destination, vice versa and repeat. But that doesn’t mean you can’t create a trippy generative video from such humdrum activity, like in the video installation Transits made for the Sensing Place exhibition at House of Electronic Arts in Basel, Switzerland.

Artist Ursula Damm recorded the trams and traffic motoring around Basel and the commuters who use them. Then, using this footage and running it through custom software, created by Martin Schneider, she created a generative video that shows the ghostly trails of these bodies in motion.

The software causes a streaming effect while also doing strange things to the pixels—making different colors attract to one another, along with pushing the pixels in the directions of the moving traffic and people to create a glitchy effect, where movement becomes layered to create a fluid portrait of the town. Depending on whether you have your sleepyhead on or not, this might well be how you experience the morning commute anyway.

[via Prosthetic Knowledge]

@stewart23rd