**Documentation in support of Feeding Frank (2019), discussed in Chapter 9 TWIFSY (The world is fine, save yourself)**

Background

Feeding Frank (2019), a primary source work, emerged as a reflexive experimental acupunctural art intervention in the urban environment. By invitation from the Emporium Hotel South Bank, this ‘civic hack’ leveraged the hotel’s low-resolution LED screens, which are used as a virtual concierge service to provide guests and patrons with promotions advertising the Brisbane South Banks’ services and entertainment opportunities.

Still imagery from the installation

Above: still images rendered from the video file installed on the the hotel’s 18-metre porte-cochère screen.

The porte-cochère

The enormous panoramic porte-cochère screen, visible to passers-by from the adjacent streets, was particularly interesting. A 1-minute 20-second panoramic loop was created for this multi-dimensional screen space. Numerous instances of Frank, the Fish, reflected throughout the hotel’s chrome surfaces and spilled from the glass facades into the streets.

Above: Feeding Frank installed in The Emporium Hotel South Bank porte-cochère.

Above: The video file used to serve the 18-metre porte-cochère screens. The file was formatted at 3744 × 832 pixels to suit the screen’s low-resolution pixel pitch.

The mirrored elevator experience

A vertical 55-second composition was created for the hotel’s mirrored elevators, forming an immersive mobile kaleidoscope where visitors experienced Frank’s aquatic antics in proximity and at an enlarged scale, from the lobby to the rooftop bar with intermittent stops at each floor along the way, accompanied by the hotel’s automated voice-generated concierge–going up, going down.

Above: The video file used for the hotel’s mirrored elevators, seen here as one elongated vertical image file, was distributed across the two screens embedded into each elevator–one on the wall opposite the elevators’ entrance and one on the floors. The ceilings and adjacent walls are lined with mirrors, corner to corner, floor to ceiling.

Above: This video was recorded in one of the Emporium Hotel’s mirrored elevators during testing.

Above: The video imagery was developed and tested using this scale model of the Emporium Hotels’ mirrored elevators. Two e-wasted Apple computers were integrated into the floor and wall section opposite the viewing aperture, which was used to inspect the kaleidoscopic effects produced on the mirrored surfaces inside the model.

Above: The Emporium Hotel’s interior, whose aesthetic appeasr to be derived from a remix of various design histories including Baroque, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco, feature mirrored surfaces and multifaceted facades made from numerous materials.

Above: These images were made inside the elevator during testing. They show the fragmentation of the image as it was reflected on opposing mirrored surfaces.

Examples of the video clips used in the composite image

Above: These arr three of the twenty-seven video clips used to form the composite imagery in Feeding Frank. Frank was briefly recorded using an iPhone from two perspectives: frontal and above. The colours were added with filtered light, and the circles were added as vector masks in After Effects. These circular images were then replicated and composited into the kaleidoscopic ‘filter bubbles’ in the final work.

Digital abstraction through low resolution pixelation

Above: At proximity, the screen image becomes pixelated due to the large pixel pitch of the hotel’s screen, approximately 12mm, creating a beautiful post-digital aesthetic.