Sur la table

2004

Osman Khan (US)

Eating, reading, working, cooking—all of these can be done on a table. Osman Khan makes this familiar piece of furniture the centerpiece of his artistic work and enables visitors to interact with it.

“Sur la table” is an effort to explore the household situation. Typical activities revolving around a table—like setting objects upon it or eating a meal at it—are intensified by projections that become the basis for interactivity.

A camera mounted above the table captures the events that take place atop it and feed the images to a computer that is set up with special software to process the images in such a way that the colored objects lose their color. The modified images are then projected back onto the table, which makes a continual flow of images visible.