Experimental Capture • Fall 2022
CMU College of Fine Arts • Profs. Golan Levin & Nica Ross
For my final project, I plan on creating a pipeline for capturing and stitching hi-res image segments of the contents of a 100mm x 100mm petri dish. After I record a video from the studio’s HD microscope, I plan to use panorama stitching software to create a large image that you can zoom in on and view each segment of the petri dish in HD and host that on my website so it can be viewed and appreciated by anyone remotely. for reference check out : http://gigapan.com/
What: I want to 3D scan a mass-produced whole Chicken from the market and animate it using motion capture data from a real live chicken.
Why: I wanted to explore the relationship between us and our food in the context of consumerism and industrialized animal production. Many of us are born into a highly industrialized meat industry where we don’t see the meat and other animal products we consume as parts of a living animal but as a product no different from a roll of toilet paper. Many of us would happily enjoy a steak but could not bear to see the slaughtering of the animal. This phenomenon goes beyond the animal industry and many parallels could be drawn between this and the way we use products that were produced in an inhumane or irresponsible manner.
How: well, this is the hard part. 3D scanning a Chicken shouldn’t be that difficult. I swear I saw somewhere that CFA has 2 3D scanners for lending but I couldn’t find it anymore. Photogrammetry is the plan for now. The original plan for mocaping a chicken is to rent a chicken for a week or so from rentthechicken.com and use a combination of chicken helmets and chicken harnesses or chicken jackets and some hair ties/adhesive to affix tracking dots onto the chicken. But it seems like there are greater concerns:
Map human mocap data to a 3D-scanned chicken. Would convey a very different message (along the lines of imposing our will on the animals we raise for food and romanticizing animal farming) but a lot more manageable technically.
What: I want to set up a questionnaire asking people if they were to explain the concept of war, disease, religion, oppression, etc. to an alien without using language in one or a few images, what image would they choose and/or create. I would then try to find those images or create their vision using a generative tool (like midjourney.)
Why: I was inspired by the 120 or so images that NASA chose to include on the Golden Record aboard Voyager 2 that are supposed to give a summarization of humanity. You can watch this video if you are interested.
It was a deliberate choice of the committee to leave out any images about war, disease, religion, etc. I’m interested in seeing what people would include if we do want to describe these concepts to extraterrestrial civilizations. The idea behind using a generative tool is to leverage this collection of human visual storytelling instead of relying on my personal creation which is more prone to biases and more importantly, the absolute lack of skill.
How: I want to make a website (or Google forms if I wanna make it low effort) that briefly introduces the premises and ask people to give a short description of the images that they would include for a randomly chosen concept (or should I let them choose, or let them come up with their own topic without giving any prompts?) I would then compile the responses, do some filtering, feed them into midjourney, and pick an output that best renders the original description.
Make a fake Golden record where for each of the 120 images on the Golden record, I produce an image, through photography, drawing, or AI generation, that represents the incorrect message. Commenting on the inherent fallacy of representation and the act of summarization.
Make a Golden record by crowdsourcing images that people think are not important to humanity. Would be a flip of the original record in another way.
I’m making a picrew.me-style avatar maker for fun, called “Mini-Me Maker”, and I thought it’d be really wonderful to take pictures of people after they make their avatar and showcase them side-by-side to see how people represent themselves in cartoon form! For those who don’t know picrew.me, here are some examples (and go and make your own; it’s super fun!):
This process will entail actually creating the program (and since I’m not a strong artist, I have a friend creating the artwork for me), setting up a station for people to make them (I really want to use my iPad and have it sort of tethered to something like they do in stores so I don’t have to supervise it constantly), and capture pictures of some people after they create their character to showcase them side-by-side.
I’m not sure yet how I want to stylize these images. Since I want it to be a representation of self, maybe asking the participants to take a selfie for me would make more sense? Or I could take a photo of them with a nice camera but tell them to pose however feels right/natural?