Upon my visit to the Museum of the Moving Image I had the opportunity to see wild exhibits that were beyond trippy and so different than a lot of the things one would normally scout out in a regular art museum. The exhibition that grabbed my attention and caught my eye was the Real Virtuality installations. There were six different installations and all the artists responsible for them are either painters, filmmakers, video artists, or some kind of engineer and they all use similar modern technologies to create these images and visuals that are so crazy and immaculate. The software used to create these different processed images are used to develop “simulated worlds that extend, augment, or disrupt the physical environment of the museum space.” The specific exhibit I spent the most time analyzing was the, “Cathedral,” by artist, Marco Brambilla. This piece was a single-channeled video and is basically captured video and film footage that has been digitally processed and looped. It took over 150 hours of high definition footage captured by camcorders allocated through the Toronto Easton Centre megamall in 2007 during the Christmas shopping season. Brambilla utilized compositing and rotoscoping techniques to coalesce recorded images captured from different focal lengths, points of views and from multiple different angles into one kaleidoscopic video shot. The technique of compositing involves creating an image that appears to look as though it’s always just been a single piece but in reality it is the combining of visual elements from separate sources into single images. Rotoscoping is an animation technique that involved Brambilla tracing over live-action film movement frame by frame to create animated images.
