Author: duq

Final Project Documentation

This project uses a pressure touch pad under a sheet of paper to detect the location of a marble on top of that sheet of paper. The coordinates of the marble are then sent to my Axidraw which moves (while drawing a line) directly to the marble. As the pen held by the Axidraw is attempting to go to exactly where the marble is, this attempt will knock the marble away, leading to the whole sequence repeating itself.

Over time, this makes the Axidraw chase the ball around the touch pad, all the while making a record of the approximate path that the marble takes.

Final Project Proposal – Duq

For my final project I would like to create a “texture measurer” – a high sensitivity topography sensor that displays its measurements directly onto the object being measured. This uses the Sensel with the object to be measured placed upon it and then having my axidraw drawing lines over the image with the lines perturbed by the amount of pressure the axidraw exerts on the sensel through the measured material. This draws a representation of the texture of a material directly onto the material (assuming that it is something that can be drawn on).

 

This is a quick test that I ran, you can see that the results are quite deterministic, which bodes well.

Birds or Bio Drawing – Marc

My first idea is to do light painting with my 3D printer. By sending direct Gcode instructions, I can direct my printer to move around in 3D space, and I can capture that motion over time with long exposure. For my light source, I originally wanted to use a firefly, but getting fireflies or glow worms is unethical so I can’t do that. Instead I was thinking about using motion-sensitive glow in the dark algae.

-Is this feasible?
-Will it be sufficiently disturbed to glow

-Is this still a “creature in time”
-My thought here is as the algae’s glow reacts to it being disturbed, that feedback between machine moving it and its bio glow is the qudiddity

-Could a different light source be better?

 

My second idea for my project is to use a webcam and openCV or another software to detect birds outside my window. When it does, I will record the location of the birds with my axidraw.

-How should I represent the birds?
-Trace their motion?
-Draw them at a single frame in the abstract m style?

-What software can I use to detect birds?

Looking Outwards #04 – Marc

I’ve never worked with long exposures myself and as it’s a pretty entry level kind of temporal capture it seemed like a good place to start. I particularly liked this collection of pieces by Dennis Hlynsky as it chose a duration and frequency of capture that aligns well with its subject.

Though the temporal capture of “The Forty-Part Motet” by Janet Cardiff is pretty simple – just audio recording, I find the way that they are displayed and work together to be very attractive. I like how each individual’s voice is it’s own uniquely subjective capture of pem in alium numquam habui and how these can all then interact with one another.

 

https://www.jasonshulmanstudio.com/photographs-of-films

I really like Jason Shulman’s “Photographs of Films” because it has that “how come I never thought of that” feeling which is always a great sign for a piece in my opinion. I really love a capture techniques that are somehow a re-encoding of an existing object in a novel way that maintains elements of the original object in some way.

Typology of Frick Fire Hydrants

My tentative idea for my typology is to create a typology of fire hydrants from Frick Park. The park is a place that is close to my heart and I have been passively taking pictures of every fire hydrant that I inexplicably find in the park. I want to go back in a more consistent manner and search out as many of the fire hydrants as I can. I think this has the making of a good typology project as every single one of the fire hydrants is unique due to the high levels of wear and tear associated with being in the  middle of a forest. My main question is how should I best capture these fire hydrants. I could just take pictures from a consistent angle, but I want to do something a bit more unusual if I can. I could include the path that I take to find these fire hydrants as a part of the capture, or I could use something like putty to create pressings of a specific part of each of these fire hydrants. I could also take a paint chip off of each of them but I am not sure what I think about a capture technique that requires destruction.

My current fire hydrant collection:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/7mu7mpvHZfvdmg7f8

3 Capture techniques

Capture 1, slowmo: (highly recommend sound on)

 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/KPUmFgD2pv91LsQM6

 

Capture 2, timelapse:

 

Capture 3, Pano:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/bzk2raWGmoZT9hmm8

 

I won’t lie, this particular assignment didn’t really speak to me hence the basic choice in capture techniques. I more or less tried to integrate capture into my pre-existing plans for the weekend, most clearly visible in my time lapses, which are also the most boring. With the panos, my hope was to be able to walk around an object in a circle and get the real world item’s “texture”, in the video game sense of the word. My phone would not allow me to do this so I just tried to abuse the software as hard as I could. Finally, for the slow mos, I wanted to capture the ubiquitous (I hope) experience of dropping your phone on your face when you’re drowsy. I have always struggled to give candid reactions while being aware of being filmed so I actually quite enjoyed making this capture because the panic of Object Coming at Face overrides my camera-shyness allowing for far more candid film.

Photography as an empirical and bias free measurement

Near the beginning of the reading Wilder writes that soon after the advent of practical photography, the medium was seen as an accurate and unbiased way to capture the world. For most intent and purposes this is completely correct. I focused on this line as for one of my current projects, I am working to remove the camera distortion from pictures taken from a webcam so that the true coordinates of items in the picture can be determined. This is one of the important cases where photography does not adequately capture an unbiased view of the world. The bias can be seen, quite literally, near the edges of the captured image. In this case, I am trying to remove this bias, but I could see artistic opportunities that take advantage of such photographic biases. For example, you could take a set of perhaps twenty pictures centered at the same point at levels of magnification m where m = 0.9^n for n in the range 0 to 19. Then splice together the outermost 10% of each image so that each image of higher magnification is nested within the image of lower magnification. This should create a single image with the same level of high barrel distortion present near the edges of a picture throughout the entire image. This would create something interesting (but I’m not quite sure what).