Reactor

Starry Night Comes to Life With a Wave of Your Hand

by An Xiao on February 16, 2012

LOS ANGELES — Have you ever stood in front of a painting and just wished you could reach out and touch it? Imagine dipping your finger in Monet’s lilies and watching them shimmer and come to life as you wave your hand.

That’s the dream come true in Petro Vrellis’s take on Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” (1889). Tapping into openframeworks, the artist has brought the classic impressionist brush strokes to life. Users can slide their hand or finger on the moving strokes, and they’ll follow in accord, and they’ll flow and adapt like the surface of a pond. Hopefully with all the attention Vrellis has been getting, he’ll be able to release an iPad app soon or, better yet, a version that can be hooked up to Kinect.

The Atlantic has an incredible array of other classic works updated for the interactive animation age, including Sebastian Cosor’s animation of The Scream:

Next up: a Photoshop tool to make Renaissance women fit today’s standards of beauty.

Tagged as: Petro Vrellis, Vincent van Gogh

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  • Den Hickey

    I can’t deny its hypnotic and interesting, but in a wholly different way than the actual painting.  It seems to me that things like this help make deeply emotional work like this into a cartoon.  Rather than interact with artwork on a more intellectual and emotional basis beyond simply novelty and entertainment, we end up with little screens that give us an epically truncated experience.

    • anxiaostudio

      -comment deleted-

    • anxiaostudio

      Does it have to be either/or? Using this interaction doesn’t take away
      from the original painting; the original work still exists, and we can
      turn off our computers and stand in front of it and contemplate it again. 
      I feel like apps/videos/interactions like these are a 21st century form
      of sketching, a way of re-making the original work in one’s own style and perhaps learning a bit along the way.

      • Den Hickey

        Well, yeah.. it kinda does in a way.  For example, can you hear Queen and David Bowie’s Under Pressure anymore without at some point thinking of Vanilla Ice’s sampling of that song?  Remixing can easily change how we see the original.  We can have much the same experience of the original, but we still have that other quite different view of it in our minds.  This isn’t to say it is wholly negative, but it can take away from our deeper experiences of the original work.

        As for these sorts of things being equivalent to sketching, I would disagree as very few people.. far fewer who have ever sketched artworks.. actually make these sorts of things and those who simply use an app to do something like this aren’t generally doing anything too original.  I wouldn’t be against such things, but lets not try to call it 21st century sketching.  I would also say that 21st century sketching would be… actually sketching during the 21st century.

        • Robert Thomson

          haha, right on Den hickey I completely agree. Forceful entertainments (e.g. television, Iphones etc., pretty much anything whose main operation relies on the play of directly-viewed electric light) are better able to beguile a viewer, to do the work of the viewer’s conscious mind for them–despite the expanding veil of ‘interactivity’–and lead the viewer into lazy thoughtlessness. And so we have Avatar, we have Michael Bay, yay 3d glasses.

          • anxiaostudio

            I honestly fail to see how one takes away from the other. I like Avatar but I also like Godard’s My Life to Live. I think there’s room for both in this world.

          • Robert Thomson

            Fair enough, the reason I am being a snob about it is that I really don’t believe that these snazzy new things do leave room in our imagination for experiencing quieter, perhaps less dynamic things. So for me there is a great deal at stake.

          • Robert Thomson

            it’s like riding a roller coaster all the time, your senses are dulled so as to handle all the stimulation. Me, I like quiet walks, so that’s where i’m coming from.
             

  • http://www.facebook.com/vorisek Thomas Vorisek

    entertaining, but nothing more imo

    • Den Hickey

       or rather it is entertaining and interesting (while still novel) but doesn’t really tell us anything… doesn’t lead us to anything.

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