Contemporary Issues Forum

Local Projects 2010

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY
PERMANENT INSTALLATION

Located at the new National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, the Contemporary Issues Forum encourages visitors to engage, consider, and debate current issues of vital importance. Visitors are invited to document their personal insights and to dialogue with others as they enter the debates that typify democracy, America, and the immigrant experience.

Visitors entering the gallery encounter a table stocked with three types of custom cards that are color coded and labeled with either "Yes", "No", or "Um". Each of the four walls presents a different question, from "Should the government regulate where houses of worship are built?" to "Is intermarriage a significant threat to religious communities?" After reading the questions, visitors write their responses on cards, scan them, and then post their cards to the wall.

As they touch the wall, each visitor is captured in video. These recordings are continually re-projected in the space, accruing a physical history of the debate and creating an association of responsibility by showing the author of each opinion.

The Contemporary Issues Forum involved the coordination of four projections and 12 cameras. It was a significant technical accomplishment to calibrate projected video to physical surfaces at the level of post-it note text and perform color tracking and motion detection on the same walls. The software was realized with Jitter and OpenGL filters. Read more about the code here.