City Live, interactive futuristic city.

Live City

In the work City Live , the artist of Baltimore Daniel Shiffman shows us a metropolis imperceptibly button, which is colored lights when the viewer decides to participate in the creative process. Initially we observe a grid of black and white pixels that together make us perceive the image of a typical city skyline, a skyline skyscrapers and consists of a wide road with cars passing, a composite landscape that changes slowly but steadily , framed day and night. At a time when the viewer operates on the grid by clicking anywhere, images, filmed by the cameras on the West Side Highway in New York City, are reworked, through software processing, and implemented with other color images: those characteristics the neon lights of Times Square. Assuming that each metropolis appears to us as a complex system consisting of several individual elements, ie buildings, blocks, neighborhoods, cars, pedestrians, Shiffman performing the study of a digital environment that is constantly changing, and as parts of a city take body and move in front of us in everyday real life, by relating each with their surrounding physical elements, so symbolically each of these pixels interacts with neighboring pixels. The viewer can just look at this process that continues in its internal equilibrium, but can also choose to get to collide with this reality, just click on the screen, so how can wait a long time before taking action, or can do so only once or several times and still get different effects. It has one certainty: interacting with the system, the system changes. In other works by the artist, such as Mosaic, Reactive, Swarm and Timeframe interpretations interactive digital movement, Shiffman, by his own admission, is inspired by the studies of Eadweard Muybridge, pioneer of cinematography, photographer and scholar of human movement and animal (Galloping Horse 1878 Elephant Walking, 1887, the Ascending and Descending Stairs Stairs, 1884-85, Movement of the hand, drawing a circe, 1887) – motion studies subsequently taken by the Futurist movement in painting, (to name a few: Boccioni, Dynamism of a Human Body, 1913, Balla, speed motorcycle). Live In City, recalling to mind the decomposition of the shapes of the city of Futurism (eg, Boccioni, The City Rises, 1911 Alexandra Exter, City of Night, 1913), animated day and night, in constant motion, with roads and huge lights and cars (another symbol of the Futurist poetics), Shiffman, away from a type of documentary photography, aware that the language of digital moving images could go beyond a mere reflection of reality, presents us with one of the defining themes of the net art, that the work that is done and integrates with audience interaction, which is projected into the work itself and its artistic dialectic. As already Boccioni wrote: "In painting we will place the viewer at the center of the picture doing that is the center of emotion rather than a mere spectator."