Lee and the Carpet
Well before Skype and Zoom, A.R.T. had cobbled together a system we called the Flying Eye. It empowered A.R.T. artists to be physically in Princeton and direct a camera somewhere far away.
In this case the furthest an artist had operated from our studio was Disney World in Florida.
Personally you couldn’t pay me to go to Disney World.
But we had our fabulous IT guy Ray and his family down there, and he had worked on the system so knew it well and was willing to be the cameraperson the artists in Princeton would direct. Everything the camera saw they saw.
The sassy teen Lee had the camera pan the typical things you see walking around Disney World. Her clearly not turned on by the subject matter, Ray announced he wanted to get a tripod from his hotel room.
As he entered the room, the camera that sent the images to the Princeton studio still on, it pointing down, Lee perked up, signalling the Princeton Tracker to ask Ray to stop.
The camera was looking down at a wildly patterned carpet featuring futuristic imagery.
Ray being informed Lee was interested in the carpet he held the camera lens pointing directly down.
Lee had him move the framed image so it no longer saw the floor molding.
She had him zoom in, then zoom out. Satisfied with this, she directed him to move the camera a little this way, a little that. She paused, then directed a move once again, followed with clear body language letting the Tracker know this was the image she wanted a still of.
How cool. Such a young person not wanting cliche shots of the fake castle but had found an intense set of moving colors kin to her own paintings. And this was the still she had shot and later printed.
You can see why it is the deepest pleasure working with the A.R.T. artists. They look and think for themselves. They are comfortable with driving the systems so they got at what they want. At what expresses what they are into. They are so individual and so confident.
I mean, how many people in the world have taken photos of a hotel carpet? And composed the image so it worked as an energized abstract painting?