Virtual Skin: Arts-based Educational Research and Virtual Image

Abstract

Summary

"Virtual Skin" is an educational workshop in Visual Arts that uses the virtual image from an a/r/tografic approach. We use video mapping on human skin to investigate the multiple creative, artistic and pedagogical possibilities that virtual environments have as spaces for image creation.

In every artistic activity there is a research purpose as long as the creation factor involved is taken into account (Muntané, M. D. C. G., Hernández, F. H., & López, H. J. P. (2006). Although such processes and research purposes need a scope of diffusion and conventional models of formulation and dissemination to allow critical activity and its validation by the academic community. Biggs, M. (2003).

In our creation workshop we have worked from the work of the photographer Daniel Oliver. His works are photographs of bodies with different forms of light projection. They are photographs that show volumes, shapes, anatomical contours combined with the multiple optical effects produced by light and the images it projects on the bodies. Thus, natural volumes are mixed with virtual skins, creating a sensation of depth on the skin and generating dialogues between the light that illuminates the scene and the light that comes from the projected images. The results of the artistic practice are shown in the form of photo essays or video creations.
Because of these games and combinations, in Oliver's work, the virtual image is a tool of enormous versatility in which the digital becomes virtual.

The creative use of the virtual image through ICTs that revolve around the technologies of storage, processing, retrieval and communication of information through different electronic and computer devices. Belloch, C. (2012) affordable in the classrooms of Artistic Education help in the construction of methodologies that allow through experimentation photography, video creation and use of digital platforms a fertile encounter of enormous aesthetic value. Innovative practices that develop a dialogue through light, spaces and the message as an end of the medium.