Robbie Cooper - Immersion

 

Photographer: Robbie Cooper

Robbie Cooper is a British artist working in various media, including photography, video and video game modifications. Cooper studied media production at Bournemouth College of Art, and in 2002 embarked on long term project Alter Ego, which explored the identities people created within virtual online worlds. The images from the project have been exhibited internationally, and were published as a book in 2007.

     

Work: Immersion (2008)

In 2008 Cooper began the Immersion project, in which he records the expressions on people’s faces when they are watching TV, playing video games and using the internet. As a viewer of the project, you can’t see what the participant sees, only their facial reaction to what they are experiencing. For the project, Cooper uses a technique developed by filmmaker Errol Morris called the Interrotron method; a modified autocue using a one-way mirror to reflect an image towards the viewer whilst they gaze into the camera. As well as capturing the participants ‘immersion’, Cooper created a studio environment which he called ‘anti-shoot’, in which the attention of the participants is diverted away from the purpose of the activity.

The aim is to build up a portrait series that begins with babies and ends with the very old, taking in every type of media content along the way. Screen time takes up an increasingly large part of our lives: babies being born right now arrive in a landscape where computers, smartphones, the internet, and social media already exist, while the oldest generation alive today can remember a time before TV was a fixture of our living rooms.

The idea came to Cooper while working on his project Alter Ego in China and Korea; in those countries there are huge internet cafes with row upon row of kids playing virtual world games. It got Cooper thinking about our interaction with the screen. The first media he used for the Immersion project was video games but wanted to expand this to as many different subjects as possible; comedy, sports, religion, literally any subject we interact with through screens. Immersion was filmed with very high resolution video from which still images are lifted. With video you are shooting between 25-30 fps, and it’s amazing how the human face changes; an expression can pass across a face in less than a second. Much research has been done into micro-expressions, such as when someone is trying to hide something. Those kind of emotions will come out very quickly. Cooper initially considered shooting Immersion with an environmental background, but he wanted it to be something that’s completely removed from that so you just concentrate on the person and their headspace and psychological world rather than their social world. As soon as you’ve got a room you’ve got a whole bunch of other information that’s coming over that’s maybe unnecessary. He wanted it to look a bit like advertising or something in a really off-kilter way. On average people look at a screen for 8 hours a day. The project is trying to capture authentic emotional life.

References

 

National Media Museum, (2010). Robbie Cooper Immersion. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jXpvGBP0U0 [Accessed 16 Jun. 2016].

Thom, E. (2013). Do You Spend A Lot Of Time Screen Watching? Collaborate With Robbie Cooper On His Immersion Project - National Media Museum. [online] National Media Museum. Available at: http://blog.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/robbie-cooper-immersion-mass-collaboration-kickstarter/ [Accessed 16 Jun. 2016].

Wikipedia. (2016). Robbie Cooper. [online] Available at: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_Cooper [Accessed 16 Jun. 2016].