#525Junk Shadow Theater
An homage to Tim Noble & Sue Webster's shadow sculptures. A messy cloud of floating junk — thin bars, shards and a few rings — hangs in space while a single point light orbits, throwing shadows onto the back wall that thrash meaninglessly, until the light drifts through one sweet spot where every shadow snaps into a human profile. The junk is placed by inverse optics: the target silhouette is point-sampled on the wall and each point's piece is scattered to a random depth along the ray from the sweet-spot light through that point, so from that one position every shadow lands back on its mark. There is no shadow map — each piece casts a soft dark blob, planar-projected from the live light onto the wall in closed form and rewritten every frame. Off the sweet spot the blobs bloat into penumbra and fade; at it they tighten, darken, and the wall flashes a touch brighter, while the light eases to a near-pause as it crosses — the 'found it' beat — then rushes back through the chaos.