The Skyscraper Museum is devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. The Museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. This site will look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.

Tuesday, February 9, 2016 6:30-8 pm

Bob Bowen

On Creating a 4D Video Sculpture: The Lower Manhattan Shoreline through Time, Extracted from Archival Footage

A screening by artist Robert Bowen and a conversation with historian Carol Willis

Photographer and video artist Robert Bowen has long been fascinated by New York’s skyscrapers. His interest in the city’s architecture and in early moving images come together in this project in which 3-D hyper-stereoscopic depth is digitally extracted from archival 2D film footage. As Bowen writes:

One day in 1903, the filmmaker, J.B. Smith, on assignment for the Thomas A. Edison Co. of West Orange, NJ, took a boat ride around Lower Manhattan. This project takes off from a digital stereoscopic conversion of what Smith saw, what he didn't see, what we see now, what's missing, and what's been added since.
This video presentation is based on Bowen's experimental media project, N.Y. Background. The film will be followed by a conversation between the artist and Museum Director Carol Willis.

Note: anaglyphic 3-D glasses are required to view the material stereoscopically.

ROBERT BOWEN is a New York-based new (and old) media artist whose work includes site-specific visualizations, performances, and screenings combining computational photographic approaches, in particular, temporal montage. He teaches courses on Photo/Video, and Computer Art in the MFA Program of the School of Visual Arts.

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The exhibitions and programs of The Skyscraper Museum are supported by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.