Frontera V.2/portrait works mainly with real time video manipulation in relation with the user’s actions. In it the user can interact with a set of different video recorded real life characters that react to his gestures by imitating them. The projected characters imitate specially one gesture: when the users lay their hand over the glass screen where the work is back projected, the person in the video puts his or her hand in the same position, as if touching the user, but while doing so, the character doesn’t sit still, it blinks and breaths, and if the user moves his hand over the screen, now acting as a glass window, the character follows in a mirror like movement. Touch is desirable but not necessary, even the proximity of the user’s hand will make the character react.
Internationally understood and widely seen in movies and television, this gesture speaks both about the need for communication and about the impossibility of communicating. It makes possible an encounter among a real and a virtual character or, more precisely, a character who is physically present and other who is only represented by his apparently live spectral clone.