Author: anjle

Final Project, Smalling, Documentation

Smallness — the form of being small, the action of having to contort oneself, and how that works when it has to happen consciously, with no immediate threat or reward.

This idea came out of considering more formal elements of small bodies along with “smallness” as a symbolic item (as it’s used in movies and other media,) and smallness as a relatable concept. Knew from the beginning I wanted it to be kind of a formal + abstract concept over a statement of politics or a continuation of some other body of work. I think it can be easy for new media-y artworks to slip into the “well this is actually about […]” hole, and I wanted this to “actually” be about being small. 

Had no clue on what output would be at the beginning. I didn’t like the idea of it being self portraiture, but it did start as loose physical experiments in my messy studio such as this:

Made some little baby tests working through what method of isolating the small person/what will it look like, then tested on a prefabbed model for detecting bodies (semi-unsuccessful.) Landed close to something like our little dog friend (below) using a homemade mini green screen and ChatGPT code to key out the green.

Had some more thoughts about what is important about the form of smallness to me and looked at some images closer to the stock images below. Was thinking about discomfort, albeit discomfort in a less comical/extreme setting.

While still working through output and conceptual themes, made some tech swaps. Moved from computer webcam to this camera (I want to say it’s a UV or something odd, but functions as a “normal” videographic cam as well.) Also learned what a magic arm is. Kept this setup through the rest of the project.

Continued to struggle with output, the actual program (I took one coding class and my brain is bad at absorbing those things so just about all of it came out of AI and other people,) and defining the rules of the “game.” Lots of just odd-looking problems like this:

Got it to a point where the program at face value looked decent, but wasn’t really doing what I intended. Walked around CFA asking people to participate. Here are some of the first tests:

These were visually interesting enough, but I wanted to keep working on my problems (random artifacts, was accidentally measuring people in a way that prioritized small frames, etc…) Person-in-time critique happened on the images above and I just allowed myself to continue on with it for both the final critique and showcase.

Here’s a test reel from the first few moments that the program was working semi-correctly, but with a stretched camera feed:

Fixed the stretched aspect ratio, cleaned up some of the gameplay so that it could theoretically be played without me standing there, and ended up with a better smalling game. People stand against a green screen, everything green is chroma-keyed out, and the surface area of anything not green is measured against the previous size (a person standing at full size when the program starts is 100% of their own surface area, if they bend over, they might be at 65%, etc.). Time is variable and depends on beating one’s own high score—if 10 seconds have elapsed where the participant hasn’t become smaller than their previous record, the game ends.

Showcase setup used the Teenie Harris touchscreen and a bunch of connections that I barely understood (thank you Golan.)

Did the showcase. People were surprisingly into the interaction. Here are some favorites:

here’s a larger grid:

 

here’s some photos my mom took:

here’s nica:

here’s golan:

Here’s a Drive link to all of the documentation from the project (will be filled out more as soon as I get the rest of the photos from my mother lol) https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15w6p3tWv3adpP5IOV0rvUOIz_rthblA4?usp=sharing

I found it massively expanding, emotionally/mentally, to see the interaction play out in front of me as someone who had been hesitant to ask for participants up until the moments I desperately needed to. I also have thoughts if I were to go back into it. I would have liked to have it at a fully “remote” point, where I really didn’t need to stand there to let people use it, and I’m unsure if it might have benefitted from physical seclusion. That all said, I’m generally more of a “do it and move on” person, so spending this much time with one project feels like enough of an accomplishment for now.

Final Project — Revision of Project Two (Smalling)

Hello darlings. My final project is essentially a revised and fixed version of my previous project –smalling.

To recap, particularly for any new guests, I’m interested in the form of being small, the action of having to contort oneself, and how that works when it has to happen consciously, with no immediate threat or reward. This idea came out of considering more formal elements of small bodies along with “smallness” as a symbolic item (as it’s used in movies and other media,) and smallness as a relatable concept. Some of the images I was looking at were these:

I had ChatGPT write most of my code, and then Golan, Leo, Benny, and Yon helped fix anything that I couldn’t figure out past that, so I can’t explain most of the technical details here. What I can say is that it’s a pretty basic green screen setup, the program turns anything green to white judging on hue values, functions for ten-thirty seconds (this number has changed over the course of the project,) and retroactively takes a picture of the participants at their smallest size during that time. The tests from the previous version looked like this:

The problem with this, which I didn’t address in the last critique, was that it measured the size of the person compared to the canvas, not as compared to their previous size. This privileged people with smaller frames and was never my intention, it was a genuine forgotten detail over the course of the mess of me ChatGPT-ing my code. This is fixed now (wow!)

Here’s a mini reel because WordPress doesn’t like anything that isn’t a teeny tiny gif compressed to the size of a molecule ♥️  sorry

This is essentially where it’s at right now. I’m mostly looking for feedback on potential output and duration of the piece. As far as duration, I noticed that even with more time, most people tended to immediately get as small as possible and then were left to backtrack or just sit there. On the other end, there were a few participants that were kind of shocked by the short amount of time, even when they knew what it was before starting.

As for output, I had somewhat decided on a grid of photos of people at their smallest that’s automatically added to as more people participate, but I started feeling not so good about that. It would look something like this: (and be displayed on a second monitor next to the interactive piece)

Some of the other ideas mentioned in my proposal include:

  • physical output (golan mentioned receipt printer, but open to other ideas here) example here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thart2009/53094225345
  • receipts could exist as labeling system or just an image
  • scoreboard on a separate monitor
  • website with compiled images of people at their smallest
  • email sent to participants of their photo(s)
  • value to descriptor system
  • some other form of data visualization or image reproducing (???)

I’m not married to any of these. If any ideas are had please let me know. I just don’t want anything to become too murky because it’s being dragged down by a massive unrelated piece of physical/digital output/data visualization/whatever. There’s already the element of interaction that makes this project inherently game-like, but I’m trying to keep it from becoming too gimmicky.

 

Final project proposal

My final project is essentially going to refine my most recent project, so people making themselves small with little to no threat or reward. Reminder image here:

One of the issues with this project when I presnted it recently is the program was shooting out the pixel value of a person within the canvas. My intention was not for this, but for it to give the “percentage of person” compared to their previous percentage.

Say you’re standing at full height, facing the camera. Your size or pixel value should be 100%, then if you were to double over your size or pixel value should be 80%, and then if you laid down and got as small as physically possible, maybe your size or pixel value would be somewhere near 60%. This was the intention, but not the outcome, and one of the things I would like to fix in the adjusted version. This way there won’t be priority given to people with naturally smaller figures.

I feel like because this makes the person’s initial size much more important, I’ll also need to figure out a way to make the “game” elements much cleaner and easier to navigate. EX: “stand in the frame,” game auto starts, “make yourself as physically small as possible,” timer and pixel value are clear at all times to viewer. This way it can be operated by anyone and they will have clear preparatory instructions without me just talking at them. I don’t want to have to sit behind a screen during the showcase.

I still don’t want it to be too game-y in a kitschy sense, so it’ll probably be closer to an interactive art piece. The thing that encourages people to interact is the main point of contention as far as my thought process, and it’s the portion I think I could use the most input on. I have a lot of ideas and I feel kind of okay-ish about them all.

Some of those ideas:

  • physical output (golan mentioned receipt printer, but open to other ideas here) example here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thart2009/53094225345
  • scoreboard on a separate monitor
  • website with compiled images of people at their smallest
  • email sent to participants of their photo(s)
  • some other form of data visualization or image reproducing (???)

Like I mentioned above, these all feel kind of “meh.” Either I’m interested in it, but it feels disjointed from the general vibe of the project, or it fits well with the project, but I don’t really care about it as a concept. I liked Heidi’s word choice of “turtleing” and I think there are ways the game/interaction could become more specialized like that. Like, this isn’t just “getting small,” its repeating a familiar/symbolic gesture. (using my bus example,) “rush hour [bus line], with the instruction to get small, and a receipt printout with some “thanks for riding” -esque text.

I’m most concerned about unnecessarily weighing it down, which I think the above concept may do, but I think it might be (?) in my favor to think about things that way. IDK!

Person in Time Final — Smalling

Inspirations/etc…

This one actually came out of the process for the last project in a roundabout way– specifically this image:

I really wasn’t a fan of this process image as is, but my obsession with holes and the desire to relate them to my/our body(ies) still stood.

So I started thinking about smallness, which is actually represented everywhere all the time when you start to acknowledge it. A more commercial example is that it’s an ever-present movie trope such as shrinking to reduce one’s carbon footprint (Downsizing) or shrinking as an act of scientific genius (Fantastic Voyage.)

But these are all movie tropes. What becomes somewhat more relatable is these really stupid stock photos, otherwise known as taking the 61, 71, etc… out of CMU campus anywhere between 5-5:30. And this is more what I was thinking, the displacement of a contorted body in a crowd, but I guess without the crowd. 

And I mean, these are also just really good images. Like this situation:

There’s something kind of perverse about this situation. 

I’m not interested in statements about shrinking my carbon footprint or really any form of political statement for that matter. I’m interested in the form of being small, the action of having to contort oneself, and how that works when it has to happen consciously, with no immediate threat or reward. 

Here are some earlier tests:

But I knew I didn’t want the entire project to be self-portraits, and I didn’t want to publicly intervene more than I needed to. So it became more of a simulatory situation. I made a “machine,” that makes people get small, with really not a whole lot of threat or reward involved. The machine was a combination of a live camera feed captured by p5/JS that uses Chroma keying techniques to record a person’s “size” (pixel value) and a makeshift greenscreen setup.

I’m going to say that this captures people at their smallest during a period of ten seconds, but outside of that I’m going to conveniently skip the explanation of what exactly is going on here because I think it will only attract critique that I’m not interested in.

In the mess of figuring out the equipment and the hard task of getting ChatGPT not to fuck up my code; this didn’t turn out the way I had talked about it turning out and I think transparency here would only cloud what the ultimate goal of the project was. I think this may be the item I take into my Excap final, as I’m interested in refining it and “making it do the thing I actually want it to do.” There were issues with the green threshold that was being keyed out, the camera setup was kind of decided last minute and I think could have benefitted from a stricter ruleset, and I’m interested in further gamifying the piece.

Here are some small people:

Here is the camera setup (I don’t have green screen photos and am not sure how necessary it is to add after my presentation, although the feedback was heard)

Person in time WIP — smalling (?)

Smalling/being smalled…title is a WIP – the way the body contorts when centered on itself. This is to say, there’s a focus on the motion of making oneself physically small, and that motion as one that can only occur when one is very much aware of their own body.

Capturing people (or myself) while physically making oneself small — either naturally (due to environment needs or lack of awareness), or artificially (forcing oneself into a small space intentionally.) 

Not sure what output is here, have a few ideas:

  • smallness as form and a formal quality of an object or person. Would probably be me shoving myself into tight corners and with a nicer camera setup.
  • smallness as a kind of game? I don’t think I want it to be too game-y, but image segmentation is an interesting option and I talked very briefly to Leo and Golan about attempting to live-time measure how small someone has made themselves or how much their form has reduced. I would prefer not having to solely photograph myself so leaning towards this.

Some semi-successful and mostly not great or all that pretty examples of both of the above options:

Detection of small body on goofy prefabbed segmentation thing Leo sent me:

That, but in video: SORRY I DONT KNOW WHY MY NORMAL GIF SITES AREN’T WORKING

Video Player
Video Player

Ok. Now photos:

Looking Outwards 04

Sophie Calle — The Address Book

Calle finds an address book on the ground, belonging to a certain “Pierre D.” She photocopies the book before returning it anonymously, and then goes around tracking down the names in this book, interviewing any who will respond to find out more about the owner. Chaos ensues, etc… I personally really enjoy the perversion of this project and how naturally it meshes with the rest of Sophie Calle’s “spying,” body of work.

The Inflatable Crowd Company

Maybe a bit of a stretch to call this temporal capture or portraiture, but in my defense they are creating temporal “portraits” of non-real people to be captured in the background of a cinematic event. Also I just really wanted to include them because they’re so weird and I think cheap movie-trickery can be really beautiful as fine arts. Company that creates inflatable dolls to fill the background of crowd scenes in movies for a price cheaper than creating the same effect with CGI.

A little Rippley’s video on it: https://youtu.be/66PIr7Z2QZ8?feature=shared

Jenny Holzer — Cursed (? There are a few different ways it’s being titled online and I did not take a picture of the info-plaque-thing when I saw it)

Lead and copper plates with tweets stamped into them. Kind of a portrait of the president’s digital footprint made permanent. I’m not the biggest fan of the very on-the-nose choice of subject, but I understand the decision and think it does it well. Big shocker to anyone who’s taken at least one class with me — I’m a big fan of poetics and the temporal digital made permanent physical.

 

Typology of holes — addressing the unaddressed 

grid of some nicer holes

My goal with this project was to find, document, and “fix” interesting holes.

My inspiration was essentially that I had a compulsion to document holes and a compulsion to fill them after that idea was proposed. I was also interested in the idea of capturing very small or unimpressive phenomena next to (I don’t want to type the word “juxtaposed,”) ideas around the movie Melancholia which involves planetary impact, and the act of real-life crater impact on earth sterilizing the local environment(s). I think all of this led to me considering this semi-literal typology machine as capturing something transcendent of the object alone. 

It is the typology of holes, but to me it’s more of a typology of the unadressed through the medium of holes.

None of this was fleshed out at the beginning. It all started with just wanting to document holes. My process began with portable-scanning the holes. This was interesting to me because it flattened the image and produced more of a satellite photo effect, but I quickly realized I could not fill a hole and then drag a device that I can’t afford across wet spackle. This project also involved a lot of back-and-forth and it became increasingly hard to backtrack my process if I were to look for them after the spackle dried. Some scanned photos below:::

I moved to DSLR and the minute-ness of the holes. Although the loss of scale that occurs with the portable scanner is interesting, I realized that even with a normal camera and measurements below the photos, the holes kind of transcend those bounds.

This was my machine:

I was looking for holes that met my requirements. Ideally they were on a hard surface like stone or a plaster wall, as that implies the motion of impact or something acting on the surface — even if that act is occuring over a large amount of time– more than something that can occur gently (hole in a patch of mud may not imply “impact” as much)

Upon finding a hole I took down measurements, coordinates, an iPhone photo to keep track of which hole I was referencing, and before and after photos with the DSLR camera. Initially the holes were going to literally be tagged, but I quickly dropped this as I found it ugly and overly intrusive.

There is still one somewhere and certainly not on an institutional property so if you see that one… feel free to sticker it up until I can get back to it and paint over the location tag.

More figuring out the process photos:

Overall this was really time consuming as I was logging much more information than what I ended up using and all of that information had to be stored in a manner that made it accessible to me later in the process. It’s also hard to find interesting holes on properties that aren’t clearly and visibly privately owned. I was trying to avoid any weird run-ins if possible. There was a lot of driving and walking (something like 20,000 steps on any given day I set aside to find holes.) I attempted to keep rags and paper towels on me to be able to continually clean the spackle knife, but ran through them faster than expected every time. Somehow no lesson was learned here.

The thing I ultimately focused on here is the meaning or lack of in these objects. Something I had spoken about early in the project is the ability to project on a hole. There is a fear or excitement factor around them of the unknown and there is a need to fix the “problem.”

Here is what holes say to me: Something unaddressed is here. 

My goal was to show that these holes exist and force you all to look at them… and for me to act on them while [attempting to] maintain the ignorance and versatility of a hole as an object. I’m sure the holes can stand alone without the act of me filling them, but I think there is something to be said for a “destructive” capture method. They are captured and can be found (shockingly my lightweight home depot spackle withstood the rain,) but I’m also not fully allowing anyone else to view them the way I did.

Here is a more selective curation of my favorites:

I don’t think this project is over. I would like to continue exploring this, it’s just a matter of that opportunity only arising again over a break when I have more free time. As kind of prefaced earlier, I’m not sure if I did the “””””right””” thing (as far as effectiveness of the project) by filling them and I don’t think any amount of external critique will clarify that internally. 

In the future I would like to return to scanning the holes, I would like to make stickers of the holes, I would like to take some extreme 200 mm+ macro photos of holes, etc…

 

 

 

 

 

 

FFMpeg test

Video Player

Combined videos and then resized after (very much half stolen from stack overflow sorry i was having file type issues and confused <3)

ffmpeg -f concat -i list.txt -c copy output.mp4

ffmpeg -i output.mp4 -filter_complex ‘[0:v]scale=240:-2[Scaled]’ -map ‘[Scaled]’ output_small.mp4

Typology Machine WIP

Post-feedback update: typology of life/death of a hole or something similair.

Will do some different camera tests with how holes will be captured. Tempted to focus more on campus so they’re accesible to students but feels more like a place I might be apprehended if I’m caught spackling and painting a hole in the depth of night.

Photographing and categorizing holes around campus/my neighborhood/home/etc. Aiming to have a quantity project. Filling holes with appropriate medium and “tagging” them. Tag may be related to cartesian coordinates as coordinate systems were brought up by every group. Something like x, y, z, [number of hole which this one is, 1-whatever] This is not graffiti and everything is fine and very lawful! Mayhaps I will use a crayon! Maybe somebody else who will never be discovered will secretly tag them for me! I certainly would not damage property intentionally.

Typology thinking:::::::

Craters: Finding myself close-encounters-levels (https://youtu.be/cdkS0TgEG30?si=ptrQVf2Vn8hg8In4) interested in impact sites — particularly on Earth (over swiss cheese moon novelty or satellite exploration ideas.) Interested in the large and small of what being on Earth is, something about impact sites feeling incredibly lonely. I think holes are easy to project on, and they’re sources of birth and death. I’m not really sure what the “data collection machine” of this all is because right now it’s just me walking around and looking for holes.

Interested in the loss of scale that occurs with the portable scanner so scanning small things around campus.

Also interesting relationship between the “fake ultrasounds” shown below and the feeling of a fake body in the holes–maybe pointing to some sort of data collection along the lines of ways people make themselves small or are small outside of choice.

Extra: Me in crater (scanned skin stretched over a stock photo)

Extra extra: Peeled back (Ultrasound?) crater

Extra extra extra: Another peeled crater

Extra extra extra extra: reverse image searched some of my scans

References I’m looking at (elevation profile and “real,” large scale crater, local biology of crater impact sites.) The elevation profiles are similair to the idea of measuring something non conventionally (this just being that I would be focused on loss of scale in measuring, would have to determine what the scaling system is (such as 1/2″ = 1 mile or something adjacent.)) However, unsure if removing the grounding in reality removes “the point,” of measuring something like this specifically.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11161300_The_biology_of_impact_craters-A_review

More:

Interested in traditional photogrammatry still. Struggling to find a way to do this that isn’t just a callback to my AI cctv project. Thinking about just unnatural forms of measuring something? This orange juice is 55 expiration dates tall.

This sculpture, as it exists as a photo and within those bounds, is 7 feet to kneecaps and one foot tall.

 

Barcode scanner? Similair to unnatural forms of measurement. Would be kind of in the form of interfacing w the public potentially. Maybe finding things that can be scanned from a persons belongings (particularly handheld objects,) and photos of their hands.

Could also function as scanning barcodes in public/not attached to a human, just in the grocery store or somewhere with similair amounts of barcodes at the ready. Not really interested in this outside of a super tangential extra possibility.

Having a hard time detaching this idea from things that could be inherent to it such as surveillance or consumerism, which I’m not really interested in attacking in this project.

 

Somatic rituals:

Written rulesets only for capture. No specific subject in mind, more about the functionality of rules as rules.

CA Conrad: https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/somatic-exercises.pdf

Pocket Postulating

I somehow completely missed this in the assignments until class today but it needs to go up for my own peace of mind

Captures in no particular order: Me with hands, shelf deities, accidental cone street art

Methods: Slitscan, pano, polycam

Some of this was accidental (coming across the cones and a still photo not cutting it,) but some was more intentional based on capture methods. Slitscan easily creates optical illusions (not really, maybe more like a falsified reality or AR.) I knew the pano would be silly because the shelf is way too high up for me to hold my hands still, but also too large for a straight photo that explains the scope of the collection.