Category: TypologyMachineProposal

My new project is examining bathroom deserts around campus. I will do so using a GoPro to recording my experience walking to and from the bathroom.

_____________old idea_________________

For my project I want to fine tune stable diffusion to output images in the style of common agricultural pests. I will then curate a collection of digital “pests” out of mundane prompts like “using the phone while talking to a person” and create an educational video about these pests (+generative video based on these images using the many tools available online like melobytes which I haven’t checked if it is legit but something similar) similar to something you’d find on national geographic kids or pbs kids from the early 2000s or before.

I am mainly inspired by these educational films from the mid 50s and 60s for the educational video aspect. In terms of the fine tuning, I am inspired by the recent fine tuning of stable diffusion on pokemon characters so that even unrelated prompts like “donald trump” are skewed towards this cartoonish art style.

After a little research into stable diffusion and realizing that I will need to spend money to train such a model, I am also looking at alternatives such as a recent addition called textual inversion, which is able to make unique tokens for stable diffusion for the purposes to customizing and/or debiasing the outputs of prompts.

I’m going to graph colorism across the top 100 grossing tamil films by getting a skin tone match for both the male and female leads.

My method

1. 1. find top 100 grossing films
      1. most are on amazon prime
   2. run through those films quickly on 3x speed
   3. screen shot the first scene where the male and female lead are in frame together
      1. this will normalize the data across each male/female pair
   4. get a color card manually for each pair
   5. and then present the data and the original screen shots‘

Idea 1:

Typologies: photogrammetry of reality printed on Polaroids

This project wants to: explore the role of the polaroid in current time; explore the boundary between “real” and “virtual”.

To do this, I want to capture photogrammetric versions of realistic ones; select and print polaroids of the photogrammetric scenes/objects. Stick a collection of polaroids onto the real object.

Why Polaroids? it’s something physical, looks “real”

 

I’m also thinking about making Polaroid emulsion lifts: I like the quality and the texture of this material, but I’m still thinking about how to fit this into my project. 

I found a bot account on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/support.arts.gallery_/. All its content is ripped from other accounts, finding them through tags like #art and #artist. The bot picks 4 to 5 images and reposts them in a gallery, the cover of which is a screenshot of their profile put on a white t shirt:

It reminded me of a post I stumbled upon (that I can no longer find) from a large bot account promoting a crypto scam, where all the comments were different bots promoting different crypto scams. It made me think about how many bots interact primarily with other bots, and the strange ecosystem that creates. An initial idea was to survey the different behaviors and kinds of bots myself (ie. crypto scam bots, nft scam bots, sexting bots, etc). Then I realized it was silly to do this manually: I could make a bot myself.

I plan on using GramAddict (the most current FOSS response to numerous Instagram automation services) to program a bot expressly to engage with other bots, finding them through hashtags (#art, #crypto, #nft, #promotion, #follow4follow, #f4f, etc…) and the comment sections of larger bots (like@support.arts.gallery_). The goal is to build up an account whose likes, follows, private messages, and all other recorded interactions represent the diversity and ubiquity of bots on platforms like Instagram.

Over the past few years, bot detection efforts have largely pushed basic python script bots out of relevancy, leaving paid services left as the only consistent way to artificially promote posts or accounts. There’s a nonzero chance that GramAddict will quickly become deprecated, and the only paid services available won’t provide me the tools I need to assess other bots. In this case, I still feel seeking out and engaging with bots manually would generate interesting results. A couple times a week, a bot will follow or comment on my Instagram, or add me to a giant group chat on Twitter. I’d expect this rate would dramatically increase if I find and follow 200 different NFT scams and comment on every automated thirst trap that graces my direct message box.

Either way, I’m jazzed to explore new, exciting, and less entertaining forms of scam-bating.

Idea 1: textures of photogrammetry scans
Originally I wanted to see if I could reconstruct, by hand, the subject of 3d object from a scan’s UV map and texture by printing on fabric or something similar. But there are other methods of messing with UVs and texture maps that aren’t so daunting so I’ve done a bit of a test for drawing over textures and I wonder if asking subjects to decorate their own textures might be a viable typology.

Idea 2: Hair
I’ve had a passive fascination with hair for a while which has resulted in a bit of a collection. There’s a lot of Victorian hair art and writing and their existence is a pretty interesting contrast to modern conceptions of not-attached-to-a-person hair as gross.

I’m interested in exploring the nature of hair as a creative medium with both my own and other peoples’ hair (or even just the images of a person’s hair) as what will be captured/typologised. I’ve made a sample of embroidered hair and so far I’ve mostly just found that it’s very difficult to work with.

I propose to create a media project that contemplates dominance and submission through performance in pornography. The typology of professional studio gay pornographic film teasers focuses on Black men who are penetrated by white men, creating a video assemblage concentrating on the body’s performance.

What patterns are present in the submissive representation of the Black male body in pornography? What does it mean to take the scenes out of context?

You can tell a lot about a person based on the type of porn they watch. This form of theatrical fantasy deeply involves itself in the webs of the viewer’s psyche. I am creating an index of porn teasers developed by major companies (Men.com, Sean Cody, Falcon studios, etc.) for the section and removing the Black performers. The film trailers will be broken down into shorter excerpts that eliminate the original context besides the Black male body. I am creating a system of organization and assemblage. The use of collage relates to the overconsumption of internet material (pornography, to be specific). I must consider the pacing and interaction of the figures and the space I am enacting. I am using the video editing software RunwayMl to mask and separate the performers from their original context.

I believe the project contains a shock value that I will have to handle with care. These images transfer through multiple digital spaces, carrying inherent harm to the Black body as the subject. It is important to consider the treatment and representation of the body throughout the work. Along with the new context, visual and audio elements must curate and reflect the new narrative to create a contemplative impact. This will be further developed in the experimental capture. Repetition, rhythm, and pacing will be crucial towards the final sketch of the project.

I am thinking about …

Sondra Perry, Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One, 2015 

https://sondraperry.com/Lineage-for-a-Multiple-Monitor-Workstation-Number-One

Annie Bercy, (Mood Boards) 

American Artist, Black Gooey Universe

Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism

Other References:

London Williams, Collage, Inkjet on canvas, Blue tape, Mixed Media, 2019

Growing up the one thing that I always loved doing was going to arcades. It brought out the excitement and giddiness of everyone. However, on top of all of this excitement there was always one other constant – the pure anger I would see brought out by the dreaded claw machine.

I am hoping to capture visualizations of human frustration. I am planning to collect a series of videos that capture claw machine players’ faces/emotions the second that the item they are trying to win slips out of the machine’s claw. In order to have accurate results and to see the exact moment their emotions switch, I would use a slow motion camera to film their faces. If we have more than one available, I can also record the claw in slow motion to sync up the cameras and make sure the timing is more exact. The final result would be a series of videos (that I would like to present in a similar manner as Tops (1969) by Ray and Charles Eames) or before/after images of the participants.

I reached out to the Dave and Busters in Pittsburgh about possibly filming in their location and they said that as long as I don’t have an extremely elaborate setup, get the consent of the players, and blur out the people in the background I would be allowed to film there.

 

Proposal

Idea 1: Chosen Doppelganger

The idea is to capture the duality of the names of international students, particularly, Chinese students. This duality of given and chosen name is an interesting phenomenon that exist in the international student community. One given name in their native language, representing the best wishes and hopes of their parents; and one chosen by themselves as a new identity that they relate to more as they begin a new chapter in a new country. The process of choosing a name is a process of self-discovery. This duality is often unseen or ignored as their native language names are simply weirdly sounded “gibberish” to people who don’t speak Chinese.

The challenge is finding a way to appropriately capture and visualize the participants’ native language name. It could be done by word description by the participant themselves, AI generated image, etc. I did a test to AI generate my roommate’s name into an image using Night Café. The result is quite promising. However, I do wish to find a more objective, automated capturing process.

Fun Fact: This idea is inspired by the inside joke between me and my friends that, while my Chinese name is a macho macho boy’s name, my English name is as feminine as it gets. Surprise, my given name literally represents “the universe”, “the stars”, and “dragon”.

Idea 2: Tiny Neighborhoods (I might turn this into a personal project 🙂

The idea is to generate more microscopic photos and add creative interpretations to them to transform each photo into a cute little world with characters and neighborhoods.

My project is gonna be “Leaves as map”. The skeleton of leaves somehow speaks the same language as maps to me. The skeleton of leaves are random but organized patterns seem like they can lead people somewhere.

To represent the connection and similarity between the system of leaf skeleton and man-built map, the first thing I’m gonna do is to scan the skeleton of a set of leaves(maybe three)

Then I’m going to set up three groups of 5 people to aim for their assigned direction starting from the same point (point state park maybe) and use a GPS app to track them. People are not going to have clear instructions on how they are going to get there but using their own will to go to the destination as a flaneur using a compass.

At last, I will overlap the GPS pattern of the path that each people has walked and the leaf skeleton to expose the similarities and differences between how people construct a path and how mother nature forms a path. This process of meditating trip is the “machine” that I’m going to make, and the final typology outcome will be a set of diagrams as shown in my drawing.

I want to focus on the experience of viewing the world from a low angle, namely a small dog’s perspective. What objects are more visible or invisible from an angle closer to the floor? How do dogs find small wild living things like squirrels and bunnies more easily than us?

I’m planning to mount a camera on a rover, record the scenery as it rolls over different streets, and run computer vision on the recorded video to identify small animals and other living things that would excite a dog. Using a post-processing softwares, I would then highlight the living things identified by CV as the recorded video plays. (e.g. blur out the rest and scale up a little the bounding box area of identified object in the video) Another way I’m considering to present the data is to laser engrave/print different snapshots of the CV identified visuals on wood, potentially in a grid or as a collage on a selected scene background.

Other note : I haven’t used CV before, so this project would be a great opportunity for me to explore CV as a tool.