Window Dressing

I live on the first floor of our apartment building. There are no curtains on our living-room window, so especially in the evening people can look straight into our house; even if it is mostly our ceiling which is visible from outside.

The original idea to use my apartment window as a rear-projection screen was developed for the Water & Fire event. As an experiment, I took a video of our fishtank, and projected it onto the window. This gave walkers-by an excuse to stop and stare into our house. The optical illusion effect worked out great, with people outside convinced that we had built an actual 8.5 meter wide aquarium in front of our window, just for the event.

The effect of projecting onto the blinded windows was so effective, and simple to execute, that I decided to use it as an alternative fireworks display on New Years Eve. By capturing the view of the apartment interior and projecting the resulting image back onto the apartment windows, a convincing trompe l'oeil is created.

The music in the video above was generously provided by Moby through mobygratis.com.

09/16/2008

Aquarium first shown during Water and fire event

01/01/2009

New Years celebration