Benji

The GreenScreen

French (or maybe Belgian?) artist, Benji, has a very interesting project called the ExtrActor(GreenScreen) (2005). The project in an installation--a greenscreen made out of hydroponically-watered grass. The idea is a pretty simple yet cool one: grow a platformed wall of grass and then use the green backdrop as a greenscreen to "extract" people into different settings. Like a greenscreen in the movies (hence the "ExtrActor"), a person standing on the lush, green platform can be placed into a digital setting by replacing all the green in the image with a pre-selected digital image. When exhibited in galleries, participants can use the GreenScreen themselves, selecting a background with a remote.

Extracted participant in a bowling alley.

Benji says that the project was born from the discovery that "a natural environment could be used as a 'greenscreen.' We, as a rule, have no green pixels in our skin so we are easily separated from nature and included into other digital environments." By this statement, I think Benji is making a comment on how humans are sort of unnatural. There is no green in our skin and, since green is the color most easily associated with nature, it could be interpreted that we are "easily separated from nature," especially when given the context of a natural GreenScreen like in this project. Because we are separate from nature (in this case both the color green and the green grass of the GreenScreen), we can be easily extracted from the image and placed into a "digital environment" of a fabricated setting. In the picture above, the participant is standing on the GreenScreen platform and her image is captured by a movie camera. The camera replaces all areas of green with a pre-selected background of a bowling alley, making it seem as though the participant is really in a bowling alley instead of in a gallery, standing on a platform of grass. As all of the backgrounds available are man-made, artificial places, it emphasizes the idea that humans are easily extracted into from natural environments to "digital environments."

In looking at the gallery of extractions, I saw that many of the resultant images didn't turn out quite as well as with a true greenscreen. In most of the extractions, some pixels of the participant's image were missing or green pixels would show up in the background (as seen below). For some reason, it seems as though the program used to select the participant and separate them from the GreenScreen was not completely successful. This might be because of the texture of the grass, the color variation in the grass, or even spots in the GreenScreen where grass was missing (it is, after all, real grass and prone to dying). I think that if Benji were to try to do this project again, there would be, as in most second "drafts," many improvements he could make to ensure the second round is much better than the first.

Extracted participant on a city street.