I am still very much in the concept formation part of this project. I recently wrote a song called "Baseball Hats and Horned Rims" that is about songwriting itself. There is a line in the song that says, "His baseball hats and his horned rims/ they are his mask but nothing is hidden."
From this point, I thought about how I could project various horned rimmed glasses and hats onto a stationary face or a mannequin to accompany the music.
It could possibly look something like this, but instead of the faces changing, the glasses and the hats on the face would change:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWhuAYaorBg
(btw "Dark" is a great tv show. Go watch it.)
At this point, I was not really sure how I could do this, or if it would lend itself toward projection mapping. After a little more brainstorming, I thought it would be interesting to play with the classic figure/ground illusion of the two faces and the vase in the middle, shown below:
If I had this illusion on the wall, I could project the profile of a person on one of the faces for a moment, but then switch to the vase for the next video. I was also thinking about showing a stationary silhouette in the video that would occupy the vase. On both the silhouettes and the profiles, the baseball hats and the glasses would be constantly switching with the music.
As far as the performative part goes, I am thinking about using a MIDI keyboard to both play some music and trigger VDMX effects simultaneously. Here is a short proof-of-concept video that shows that this is actually possible. In this video, you can see that the MIDI is both playing a sound in Logic Pro on the right, but also triggering an effect on the VDMX video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEdc_kCoMCs&feature=youtu.be
Finally, here are some more videos that I might use for the project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evilpd0q8kE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YnAlc-ZEZo