If you ever wondered what your own face chewing a marshmallow might look like if it was converted into a sonic laser light show, then the new installation from Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF), the creators of Laser Forest, should help you tick that off the bucket list. Part of the Convergence festival in London, Laser Face sees visitors filling out a form to decide what flavored marshmallow they want to chew, and electing whether or not they want a syringe full of vodka to wash it down, and then placing themselves in a dentist’s chair inside a booth cordoned off with plastic sheets. An operator gives you your marshmallow of choice, and as you chew, your facial movements—tracked on a webcam, piped through OSC, and converted and translated into points in space—are sculpted in real-time into a kind of projected laser mask which can be changed into a variety of different “laser-looks.”
The piece is the result of one of the R&D labs that MLF conducted throughout the year to feed into their projects. They’ve been playing around with facial tracking for a while, and finally had the opportunity to both apply it towards an installation and introduce food into their work. “It’s a new area for us to explore,” notes MLF’s Robin McNicholas. “And we’ve been itching to do something to justify the ‘feast’ word in our name.”
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In addition to the visual component, your mouth movements are also being picked up by a contact mic which converts them into squishy sounds, a sonic representation of the chewing motion. The more you open and move your mouth, the more sounds you make, while your eyebrows control the pitch.
“We just wanted to indicate quite clearly that you should enjoy chewing with this particular event,” notes McNicholas, “And hopefully people are encouraged to chew in quite dramatic ways. There’s a level of exploration that goes on in the chair, so it’s quite a personal experience for anyone in it, but there’s quite a voyeristic thing going on as well in the viewing areas going on either side of it. I quite like this, the voyeurism that goes with watching somebody interact.”
It’s addictive, and not just because of the sugar. Your face becomes a gurning musical instrument, generating sounds and laser forms from the faces you muster like a club kid at closing time. MLF plan to do future iterations of the project, too—this is only the begining of their explorations in personalized face-tracking laser shows.
“Face tracking and tracking in general is improving massively, and so now you can pick out human faces in kinetic environments.” notes McNicholas. “You can track and engage with different limbs so there’s possibilities to loop that in. There might be interesting evolutions of this kind of project that could be a full body kinetic experience. Like, say, looking into the sky with laser beams paired to your every move.”
The marshmallows and vodka
Laser Face is free and open to the public. Visit it at Kachette, 347 Old Street, London, EC1V 9LP. Opening times: March 20, 2:00 PM – 8:00 PM, March 21 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
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