Category: Uncategorized

Painter in Time

I recently went to the Westmoreland Museum of Art, and saw Matt Bollinger, Between the Days: 

I usually do not appreciate digital art as much as I do painting. To expand these horizons is part of the reason I took this course, and Bollinger’s combination of the two was entrancing.

I plan to do something similar, but instead of a stop motion conveying a narrative, I plan to create a stop motion of the process of creating my paintings. I usually document my process, taking photos of my canvas after each painting session, but haven’t done anything with these photos before. I plan to create a stop motion, in which one can watch the paint be smushed around until a finished work emerges.

This captures my quiddity indirectly, in that my hand is doing the paint smushing, and in the case that I am painting a portrait, I believe the intermediate steps capture quiddity in my subject.

Postmodern Nonsense? And my theory of the jargon goldilocks

Speaking of someone who leads postmodernism reading groups for fun, this was not. It triggered a discussion amongst some outside colleagues about the use of discipline specific terminology (jargon) to signal in-group status to readers.

On the goldilocks zone for jargon:
– If I were to write an academic paper in simple English, such that it could be understood by a five year old, I would not be taken seriously as an academic, even if the semantic content was otherwise valid and novel.
– On the other hand, If I were to write an academic paper in jargon so cryptic that it was unintelligible, it would not be taken seriously regardless of my semantic intent, because no one could understand it.
– I propose that there is a sweet spot for jargon (the goldilocks zone) that is necessary to prove to your peers that you’re one of them, accepting of their norms and prior work, yet understandable enough by a wide enough breadth of disciplines to be cited and circulated.

On the actual content:
I essentially agree with what I understood to be the argument: there is a difference between the object, experiment, or ~thing~ being measured (first cut), and the observation, measurement, outcome, or interpretation (second cut).

What I failed to understand is how this differs from common critiques of positivist empirical epistemological paradigms, which argue that there is no direct experience of reality (roughly, “first cut”), because we always must interpret meaning onto our experience of the world (roughly, “second cut”). If this was the argument, however, it would have been nice to say that more plainly. Perhaps there was more there I missed, in which case it would have been since to say so more plainly. 

Facial Recognition Recognition

I propose to create a typology of surveillance power by building facial recognition recognition. That is, I plan to build a computer vision pipeline that can automatically recognize and clippings of surveillance cameras from images of street scenes, an image classifier that categorizes these segmented images into the kind of camera, their technical capability for facial recognition, and the institution they are owned by and send data back to. This will enable me to automate the creation of both power maps and topographic maps of surveillance, that is: both representations of the relationships between institutions of power the surveillance acts on behalf of, as well as representations of the spatial locations different kinds of surveillance can be found.

 

Explanatory illustrations

I have an existing practice of walking around short stretches of Pittsburgh streets and exhaustively drawing every single surveillance camera I can see. This has allowed me to notice the particular different kinds of cameras: whether it be the telephone pole mounted ones that send data to Allegheny county, the Amazon Ring cameras that guard private homes and businesses, or the pan and tilt ones that create audible and motion presences outside of banks.

 

But this takes forever. What if computer vision did this for me from images taken of street scenes? Better yet, what if I used google street view images, so I could do this at a massive scale?

 

I want an inventory of every single camera visible from the street in Pittsburgh, along with who owns each, and what model of camera and what capabilities it has.

Typology Project Proposal

For my typology project I proposed a little online game which asks you to retell a story you’ve just heard.

On Thursday I got feedback on the game which had useful suggestions like how to display the data, that making it more like a game of telephone/leaning into the game aspect, and about when/how to display the instructions.

Currently I’ve finished the technologically challenging part of the project (learning how to set up a super basic python webserver and connect it to an lmdb database (and by learning I do mean following two tutorials))– and now can move on to capturing my initial story and object.

This video is of the game’s technical side working.

Looking Outwards into a geometric universe

The Portals series by Anthony James Studio presents sculptures made of stainless steel, glass, and LED lights shown in the video. The glass and LED lights are placed in a structured way that creates recurring geometric patterns to infinity through chains of light reflection.

The Portals immerses viewers into an infinite space of light and geometry. The space inside the frame remains still and fixed as the viewers move around the sculpture. It is interesting to note how this creates an optical illusion that this infinite, otherworldly universe is captured in a confined steel frame. It is a mesmerizing experience as if the viewers are observing another universe as an outsider.

The current Portals series uses an unfamiliar subject (bright LED lights forming geometric shapes) that does not exist naturally in our world. I wonder how this concept of confined infinity would immerse viewers differently when the recurring subject inside the frame is something more realistic or personalized experience, for example, a fraction of one’s experience captured through a camera.

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