Electric diver

Fantastic Diver is a great film created by Aragon’s director (Spain) Segundo de Chomón in 1905. The footage shows 19 hops of a diver who is thrown into the water. Half of the jumps are played normally but the other half are modified by reversing the reproduction of their frames, so instead of falling into the water, the swimmer leaves this to the surface creating a fantastic jump of a cyclical process: the water surface, the surface water, surface water, surface water to...

The film uses special effects film typical of the era (1905), playing with the creative possibilities of the medium and technology.

Fantastic Diver is the name of a film created in 1905 by the Aragon’s director Segundo de Chomón. This facility called Electric Diver, uses fragments of the digitized footage to develop a series of projections that the viewer can be modified by interaction with a musical instrument, a theremin, with which both generated sounds, also modulate creating a series of projections audiovisual piece variable. The work allows the user to play with the compositional possibilities of the facility, exploring a visual and sound proposal from a partnership approach.

Many early films created in the early twentieth century played with the experimentation of movement and assembly techniques faking. This is the case of the Great Diver, who was conceived over 100 years ago as an exercise in motion capture where the director changed the direction of reproduction of their frames to create an illusion of its own technological age in which it was created. The proposed installation is designed under the same name, takes this recording providing a new interactive playback system while introducing a soundtrack to the footage, allows controlled execution of the frames by the viewer, creating an exploration of the footage from reproduction contemporary possibilities of so-called new media and visual technologies that make them possible.