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Not a Bad World, Is It?

Artists Daniel Waillis and Davina Drummond develop community art projects for cultural institutions like Tate and southbank centre. Not a Bad World, Is It? was a collaboration with 20 young people from north, south, east and west London to make a new piece of artwork to be projected on to the side of The Royal Festival Hall. The artists invited viewers to contribute to the film by asking them to ‘describe the most beautiful thing you have ever seen’ via a text message. These statements then appeared as text live in the projected artwork. For this event I was commissioned to produce a custom software solution that would allow SMS subtitling of video segments for realtime projection . The video files used were a sequence of prerecorded segments that were already subtitled, alternated with 15 or so ‘empty’ films that would be subtitled live, with content being pulled from an SMS feed.

I produced a videoplayer in OpenFrameworks with a simple scheduler and subtitling feature. The predetermined segments of video were recordings of couples chatting on a bench by the Thames, the resulting conversations had been transcribed and built into th esubtitles for those sections. The alternating sections were of the same bench, but filmed unoccupied, the subtitling system I produced for these drew the text from an sms system and formatted/displayed them dynamically. I used my friend Andy Wilsons www.thumbprintcity.com system to collate the text messages and then a custom text import system to filter out the offensive stuff.

Although the event took place in some pretty freezing weather and we had to project from what was basically a ventilation shaft everything worked out great. The transitions were seamless and the live subtitling appeared identical to the predefined text. The question posed to prompt the public sms was “Have you seen something beautiful?” some of the resultant texts were genuinely moving and the contrast of the empty benches and live texts was intriguing. I could see a lot of possibilities for this sort of system in other applications and at various events. It would be nice to repurpose it at some point.