Capturing memories in video art

Using video mapping and projection, artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo captures and shares his memories and friendships. At TED Fellow Talks, he shows his charming, thoughtful work -- which appears to preserve the people in his life in jars, suitcases, blenders ...

I love to collect things.

Ever since I was a kid, I've had massive collections

of random stuff, everything from bizarre hot sauces

from all around the world to insects

that I've captured and put in jars.

Now, it's no secret, because I like collecting things,

that I love the Natural History Museum

and the collections of animals

at the Natural History Museum in dioramas.

These, to me, are like living sculptures, right,

that you can go and look at,

and they memorialize a specific point of time

in this animal's life.

So I was thinking about my own life,

and how I'd like to memorialize my life, you know,

for the ages, and also — (Laughter) —

the lives of my friends, but

the problem with this is that my friends aren't quite keen

on the idea of me taxidermy-ing them. (Laughter)

So instead, I turned to video,

and video is the next best way to preserve and memorialize

someone and to capture a specific moment in time.

So what I did was, I filmed six of my friends

and then, using video mapping and video projection,

I created a video sculpture, which was these six friends

projected into jars. (Laughter)

So now I have this collection of my friends

I can take around with me whenever I go,

and this is called Animalia Chordata,

from the Latin nomenclature for

human being, classification system.

So this piece memorializes my friends in these jars,

and they actually move around. (Laughter)

So, this is interesting to me,

but it lacked a certain human element. (Laughter)

It's a digital sculpture, so I wanted to add

an interaction system. So what I did was,

I added a proximity sensor, so that when you get close

to the people in jars, they react to you in different ways.

You know, just like people on the street

when you get too close to them.

Some people reacted in terror. (Laughter)

Others reacted in asking you for help,

and some people hide from you.

So this was really interesting to me, this idea of

taking video off the screen and putting it in real life,

and also adding interactivity to sculpture.

So over the next year, I documented 40 of my other friends

and trapped them in jars as well

and created a piece known as Garden,

which is literally a garden of humanity.

But something about the first piece,

the Animali Chordata piece, kept coming back to me,

this idea of interaction with art,

and I really liked the idea of people being able to interact,

and also being challenged by interacting with art.

So I wanted to create a new piece that actually

forced people to come and interact with something,

and the way I did this was actually by projecting

a 1950s housewife into a blender. (Laughter)

This is a piece called Blend, and what it does is

it actually makes you implicit in the work of art.

You may never experience the entire thing yourself.

You can walk away, you can just watch as this character

stands there in the blender and looks at you,

or you can actually choose to interact with it.

So if you do choose to interact with the piece,

and you press the blender button, it actually sends

this character into this dizzying disarray of dishevelment.

By doing that, you are now part of my piece.

You, like the people that are trapped in my work

— (Blender noises, laughter) —

have become part of my work as well. (Laughter)

(Laughter)

(Applause)

But, but this seems a bit unfair, right?

I put my friends in jars, I put this character,

this sort of endangered species character in a blender.

But I'd never done anything about myself.

I'd never really memorialized myself.

So I decided to create a piece which is a self-portrait piece.

This is sort of a self-portrait taxidermy time capsule piece

called A Point Just Passed,

in which I project myself on top of a time card punch clock,

and it's up to you.

If you want to choose to punch that punch card clock,

you actually age me.

So I start as a baby, and then if you punch the clock,

you'll actually transform the baby into a toddler,

and then from a toddler I'm transformed into a teenager.

From a teenager, I'm transformed into my current self.

From my current self, I'm turned into a middle-aged man,

and then, from there, into an elderly man.

And if you punch the punch card clock a hundred times

in one day, the piece goes black

and is not to be reset until the next day.

So, in doing so, you're erasing time.

You're actually implicit in this work

and you're erasing my life.

So I like this about interactive video sculpture,

that you can actually interact with it,

that all of you can actually touch an artwork

and be part of the artwork yourselves,

and hopefully, one day, I'll have each and every one of you

trapped in one of my jars. (Laughter)

Thank you. (Applause)