MATT SMITH
VACANT LOT, 131 Victoria Street
Dancers In The Dark is a simple, participatory project. The public is invited to contribute dance moves and poses in form of short video clips. These clips are then assembled into a sequential collage, then played back the same evening as a laser-projection. The nature of the conversion process stylizes the dancers into animated line drawings, reminiscent of hand drawn frame-to-frame animations. Distinguishing the individual dancers are only their moves, as the conversion process also attempts to smooth out the differences in body-shapes in the transition between individuals. The system is automatic, there is no curation - the animation is built in sequence, during daylight hours. The nightly playback starts as soon as it becomes too dark for the camera to capture new clips, poetically referencing the coming together of individuals in a dance-party after their respective work-days, celebrating one of the fundamental forms of human expression.
Matt Smith has been involved in media arts since the 1990s. While working for the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria he co-founded the loose collective of technicians and artists, FirstFloor Electronix in 1995. Since arriving in Vancouver in 1998, he has collaborated in a wide variety of art projects as an artist and/or technician. Between 2002 and 2007 Smith co-hosted the highly experimental FirstFloor Radio show on CITR in Vancouver and produced sound-art and radio shows for international broadcast. Personal milestones are the founding and operation of the Artist Run Limousine between 2002-2005, which spawned a series of international productions of “Audiomobile” between 2003-2009. As a member of the Second Site Collective, Smith created an environmental sound piece, also using his remote-sensing software, at Sun Yat Sen Garden in 2013. Most recently a solo-show this summer (2013) at CSA in Vancouver featured photography related works from 2008 to 2013.
Matt Smith
Dancers In The Dark, 2016
Laser-scanner, laptop, camera
Photos: Devon Lindsay