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VIJAY RAJKUMAR
LIGHT AS A WAVE
LIGHT AS A WAVE
2020
AI/Computer Vision, Art, Film, Installation
The morpho butterfly’s iridescent wings are not pigmented, but formed through structural coloration. The facing side of the morpho’s wings has a complex formation of ultra-thin scales that causes light waves to produce constructive interference. This gives the morpho’s wings their shifting blue color, so much so that the butterfly can appear to disappear while still in plain sight -- enabling it to elude those to which it is prey, not by strategy, but through the mere movement of its own body.
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"LIGHT AS A WAVE” is a reflection on proximity and memory composed of chronological footage found in the personal archive of videos recorded by Vijay Rajkumar on his iPhone during the year 2020.
The soundtrack pairs diegetic audio from these found videos, in particular a keyboard improvisation that Vijay played and recorded in November 2020, with a track from Miles Davis's improvised soundtrack to the 1958 film "Elevator to the Gallows".
Each frame is converted into a depth map using the MiDaS computational model for monocular depth estimation, emphasizing the proximity of objects in view of the camera, then colorized.
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