Morgan Grasham Project 4 Relief Mapping -- Altered States

Altered States is a pair of works exploring experiences with psychoactive drugs, mental illness, and comparisons between the two. Whether you read into the pieces as drug-induced or caused by mental illness depends on your personal experiences with either. Either way, we experience a warping of identity and reality itself. I combined processed footage of my family members with shaking, vascular-colored lines to emulate altered mental states. The lines increase the hallucinogenic feeling while also expressing how altered mental states can act as a hazy filter or even confinement through which we view the world.

I started by taking footage of my husband Eric and my grandmother Rita (both good sports) and digitally rearranging them in Processing to simulate time compression and warping effects.

After harvesting thousands of images, I bring them all into Movie Maker and set the duration of each to .06 seconds to create a smooth video.   

From here, I bring the created video content into Madmapper. After using the spatial scanner to calibrate to the relief sculpture, I added and adjusted the video content to best fit the structure and desired expression. After days of building content, I only end up using about 15 seconds of each video. On top of this I added lines in vascular colors of reds and blues with some auto-shake. I decided not to add background content, because altered mental states is often an isolating experience separating you from reality and other people. 

Altered States

Altered States 2

I chose to work with the large abstracted head sculpture because it compliments the Dali-esque style of video I make using Processing and Movie Maker. I enjoyed combining a favorite process of mine with a new output and mode of expression; I think the relief sculpture compliments and adds to the work. I would like to explore this combination more in the future and experiment more with lighting, After Effects, audio inputs, and background possibilities.