Artist: Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar

This digital image of people moving around in a natural type of environment is stunning considering the realistic qualities of these digitized figures. This piece of work entitled Pedestrian by Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar really captures the real-life movements and situations of the everyday. Using real people to move around and interact with each other, Kaiser and Eshkar recorded these movements and used them in creating their own digital people, adding flesh, hair, and clothing to these bodily movements. At first glance this piece of work just looks like a video recording on a street corner, however, as you look again you notice that this is a made up world created by real live people about real life situations. The complexity of this piece is really intriguing. For instance, the decision these artists made to have this image be from a birds eye view makes the viewer feel like they are peeking in on the people below without them knowing. Also, the reflection of these people in the building adds another interesting quality to this piece and also somewhat mysterious. It's like these people are specimens and both the viewer and building are intently watching their movements while they go on, unaware, with their daily activities. Kaiser and Eshkar have also decided to create these people that clearly have different types of lives. They are not all street cleaners or taxi drivers but instead, seem to come from all different jobs and backgrounds. It's neat to see these different people interact with each other when some of them seem to know each other and others don't know each other at all.

Kaiser and Eshkar do an excellent job at capturing human relationships but presenting them in a very in-human manner. Displaying these very normal human interactions but in such a digitized way sheds a different light on our everyday interactions, it's as if we are seeing ourselves in a knew way. The artists focus our attention on these particular people and what they are doing in this moment in time, in some ways it seems like this is a suggestion on how we are caught in this daily grind of becoming robots. We do the same thing everyday but experience new situations in this constant rubric. 

Both the aesthetics and content of this piece are what make it successful and I would like to see more pieces of work from these artists in the future.