The Treachery Of Sanctuary-Chris Milk

Chris Milk’s The Treachery Of Sanctuary is a large-scale interactive triptych: a story of birth, death, and transfiguration that uses projections of the participants’ own bodies to unlock a new artistic language. The Treachery of Sanctuary is composed of three white monolithic screens sitting above a black reflective pool, visitors are invited to the pool’s edge, where their shadows appear on the first screen before dissolving into a flock of fluttering birds. On the second panel, the birds appear again, this time pecking away at and consuming the spectator’s spectre. In their shadows on the third screen, the participant is bestowed with wings. The work consists of three 30-foot high white panel frames suspended from the ceiling on which digitally captured shadows are reprojected.  A shallow reflecting pool sits between the viewers and the screens.  In the background, anopen Frameworks application utilizes the Microsoft Kinect SDK for Windows.  This talks to a front end running Unity3D in which articulated 3D models of birds interact with the shadows captured by three hidden Kinects.