We Are Legion – Halloween Special

I hope your Halloween costume plans are in order. Check out Stephen Slappe’s We Are Legion, a project completed for the Time-Based Art Festival. Besides being an RAWKin’ piece and Halloween themed, I was responsible for the application programming end of it (AS3, PHP, and Photoshop Actions) and UI design.

From the TBA:09 catalog:

Stephen Slappe creates a never-ending army of costumed youth in a web project that mines your photo albums for evidence of what the artist calls ‘contemporary cultural indoctrination.’ For TBA, Slappe will set up stations, online and in person, in order to collect images of you and yours in Halloween garb. He will string these images together into a scrolling defense line of masked society. We Are Legion addresses personal history and pop culture nostalgia, and plays with the technological innovations that allow for rapid sharing of personal images. Slappe’s work blends humor, absurdity, and anxiety in order to reflect upon notions of home, transience, and physical and psychological escape.

For We Are Legion, I created an application which takes the images that have been accepted, and composites their cutouts against a constantly scrolling background controlled by the user’s mouse position. The images are lassoed in Photoshop, and custom script cuts out the image and creates two image files one of which is a black and white mask which is uploaded to the server.