Shadow Monsters

Phillip Worthington’s ‘Shadow Monsters’ evokes childhood memories of the telling of ghost stories in the dark in this playful real-time interactive that casts creatures on a screen, formed from your silhouette.

It is a playful real-time interactive that recreates, in digital form, the traditional shadow puppet show. Participants move in front of a large-scale light box as a camera captures their shadow, inputs it into a computer, and projects it - transformed and augmented - onto a screen. As an interactive work, ‘Shadow Monsters’ very successfully incorporates ideas of play and adventure - it is immediate, fun, accessible to a wide audience, and self explanatory. On another level, by actively engaging with the artwork, ‘Shadow Monsters’ turns the viewer into a performer and explorer. The exhibit is completed only with the interaction of people actually observing or participating in the work. In this way ‘Shadow Monsters’ injects spirit and humanity into our increasingly technologically driven society.