Mexican artist Lilia Perez Romero presents her work Frontera v.2 concluding her stay in the Netherlands Media Art Institute. With Frontera v.2 visitors can play with their own portraits. This interactive installation consists of two main components: a video booth and a playback screen. The video booth serves as a tool with which spectators can create interactive self-portraits that are shown on the playback screen and react on movement as if they were dissociated mirror images.

The Portrait - A randomly chosen character observes the spectator from a glass screen. From his pose and the framing of the shot, he seems to be waiting to be portrayed. The character will carry on like this, breathing and blinking, until the spectator touches the screen. Then, he will come out of his immobility responding with the same gesture, placing his hand and gaze on the user’s hand, following any route it follows. Trapped in this small sequence of gestures that reminds of La Invención de Morel, by Adolofo Bioy Casares, the portrayed character meets the real one at an instant of simulated communion, which expresses both the will for communication and the impossibility of it actually happening.

Frontera v.2 / portrait is an interactive installation that works mainly with real-time video manipulation in response to the user’s actions. Technically speaking, this work is based on computer vision and motion tracking technologies. A first version of the interactive portrait (Frontera v.1) was developed at the Center for Multimedia, Mexico, and has been shown in numerous venues. During the residency at Montevideo, the portrait will be improved by developing an open source toolkit that may also be used by other artists. In Frontera v.2, a new component, the videobooth, will be added to the installation and made available for public use. More >>