A collaboration of Tony Carruthers, Frank Peseckis and Bill Botzow

Tony, Frank, and Bill collaborated on a series of projects and installations during the 1990s. These projects explored a range of issues related to randomness, perspective, unpredictability, fluidity, and many other ideas suggested by Tony's and Bill's work in the visual arts and Frank's in theoretical physics.

Digital Portrait Booth was developed during the spring and summer of 1998, and was presented at the Vermont Arts Council Inaugural Arts Conference in Montpelier that year. The first subsequent public exhibition of works created as part of this project was in December 1999 at the Usdan Gallery of Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. Color prints of these digital images were presented as part of this memorial exhibition for Tony Carruthers, who passed away that October to the great sorrow of all who knew him.

The Montpelier process unfolded in four phases:

1. A subject sat for his/her portrait. Bill began a drawing in response to the subject, in marker on glass.
2. Tony observed the drawing process through video cameras positioned around the sitting area. He transformed these video streams using various filtering and editing methods. An altered video stream was then fed from Tony's video editing equipment to a computer operated by Frank.
3. Frank captured three images for every portrait sitting from this video stream input provided by Tony. Each was grabbed from a distinctly different view of the subjects. Using image editing software, Frank then combined these three images by a logical OR, causing them to interact in unpredictable ways. The motivating idea for this comes from chaos theory, which has demonstrated that chaotic behavior can emerge in a system with as few as three components.
4. The resulting combined image was saved for later printing on any of a variety of media, and was provided as a digital file on disk to each of the subjects who sat for his/her portrait.

The images shown in this web project come both from this session in Montpelier, as well as two (124or and 567or) from a trial session in East Chatham, New York at Frank's offices.

Frank Peseckis
December 8, 1999