Finally, an exhibit for your inner meddler

Little could be more innocuous and fun than John Underkoffler’s “Tamper: Gestural Interface for Cinematic Design” at the University Art Museum. Wear the special “gesture recognition” (motion-sensing) gloves and pluck images from great old movies—Night of the Hunter, Once Upon a Time in the West—finger-gun them onto a screen, and then grab and shoot your way to a movie of your own. It’s very like the cool toys that exhibit at UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art and Technology, but more awesome and they’ll let you borrow a lab coat.

Underkoffler—who was himself plucked from MIT when Spielberg came calling, looking for cool tech for Minority Report—comes into the UAM every day, tinkering with the code for his creation.  Which begs the question: Does Underkoffler not understand our dark days ahead will be brought on by smiling geniuses like him? Has he not seen Terminator? And SkyLab trying to end the world? Does he not know what can happen if, as the museum’s Sarah Vinci cheerily noted, a possible application for this technology would be pilotless planes? Do you want to fly in a plane with just a guy in a tower holding you (virtually) aloft? Can I get a ‘Hell no!’?

But let’s wave goodbye to dark futures and concentrate on the present: Should we really be able to mess with these prior artistic creations—to tamper with them, as Underkoffler’s very title points out? Well, as long as I can pluck a frog from Night of the Hunter and place it so that it can eat Robert Mitchum, my answer has to be ‘yes.’

TAMPER: GESTURAL INTERFACE FOR CINEMATIC DESIGN UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM | 1250 BELLFLOWER BLVD | LONG BEACH 90840 | 562.985.5761 | TUES-SUN 12-5PM, THURS 12-8PM | $4 | THROUGH APRIL 13

Tags: art, cal state long beach, Long Beach, minority report, tamper, university art museum