Urban Putt — the Mission's intricate indoor mini-golf course complete with a bar and restaurant that opened last year — has a new trick up its sleeve. This installation by Dan Rosenfeld called Sleepwalkers is sort of like a mini-golf hole and incorporates your ball, which you put in and peer at through a crack in the wall. His work combines the pepper's ghost illusion and projection mapping to allow a computer-generated character to appear to interact with real world objects like the golf ball, and your hand.
The installation has been visible since Urban Putt opened last spring, but it's taken some time and tinkering to get it fully functional.
Sleepwalkers from Dan Rosenfeld on Vimeo.
How it works, per the Sleepwalkers site:
"Participants are encouraged to put their golf ball into an entrance in the wall. After a few seconds of rattling, the ball becomes visible through an opening in the broken lathe, stuck inside the wall. The goal is to figure out how to get the ball out from behind the wall so it can be used to play the adjacent mini golf course.
A source of light seems to be moving inside, towards an opening in the bottom of the wall. Inside that opening, a small luminous being is visible, standing on piece of wood, slumped over and depleted.
Participants interact with the being by putting their arms through ceramic portholes in the wall, using their hands to first provide "energy" to the being and then to provide a physical platform for it to jump onto.
In the top opening, the being seems to push the ball, dislodging it and ejecting it from a hole in the wall."
