LookingOutwards – Page 7 – Experimental Capture

Looking Outwards 1

I found myself really interested in both the portable scanner and the barcode scanner, which I think is because they have similar qualities to the way they transform information. The portable scanner presents an opportunity to capture and flatten textures found in the wild, and subsequently recontextualize them. The barcode scanner presents the opportunity to flatten an object by reducing it to the number sequence on its barcode (assuming it has a barcode.) This might be kind of an intense proposal for something that quite literally just came to mind, but I’m imagining using the scanner to capture textures and create new forms of camouflage (whether that’s wearable to humans or a means of hiding an object or animal.) Again, the barcode scanner has similar possibilities. I’m imagining replacing objects with their scanned barcode or applying a barcode to an unrelated thing/person/etc… and using it as a fake ID-ing system. That one feels blander than new camo.

I’m including a video of a portable scanner in action. Forgive the fact that it’s a TikTok and the end involves self promo by the creator.

@andreyazizov

Exploring w/ a portable scanner, textures & assets available now! 💫 #graphicdesign

♬ MTA x Aline by dnldjackson22 – dnldjackson22

Looking Outwards 2

I was going to write this one about durational pieces, but literally the only piece I can remember right now is Hsieh’s Time Clock Piece (photo). I mentioned trying to do long-form durational works, but via finding documentation methods that don’t put a strain on the performer & are passive. So, Time Clock Piece is the exact opposite of that. I had a friend who I worked with on sleep-disorder art-projects do a piece where they had a bedsheet covered in charcoal powder, slept in it, then displayed the bedsheet as a drawing. I have a wall in my bedroom covered in white canvas from a video piece I made 2 or 3 years ago. Canvas hasn’t been taken down, & it’s been collecting nice smudges since. Sorry, memory is blanked!

One Year Performance 1980-1981 (Time Clock Piece)

Looking Outwards 01

There was an infrared camera and a piece of tinted glass that I found interesting and fun to play with when we were looking at all the capture devices during class time. I was so entertained to see how a piece of glass that I could not see through was completely transparent the second I held it up to the camera. It was a very interesting concept to investigate theatrically or live. It would be an interesting performance where the live performance could not be seen by the audience unless the specific camera was held up towards the glass to reveal the actions within. When playing with the glass and camera, I thought about how it would be cool to explore the forced contrasting experiences of the live audience and the captured experience. If I put a performer in a box of tinted glass who was constantly performing, knowing when they would be captured and displayed: What would that experience feel like?

Looking Outwards 02

In a similar strain of the contrasts between the experiences of the live audience and the captured experience, there was this artist I was introduced to recently who goes by the name Cassils. They’re a visual and performance artist who does some really out-there works, but my favorite of theirs is a performance piece called Becoming an Image. In this work, they essentially pound a giant block of clay in a dark room that is occasionally lit by a flash of a camera periodically. This was performed in front of a live audience. The images are incredible and dynamic, but what I am more interested in is how those images contrast the collectively created images of the live audience, who did not see much. The eye is our first capture tool, and I love how the artist plays with this concept throughout this piece- confronting the truths we capture with our eyes vs. the cameras we have invented.

Portfolio Page

Looking Outwards 02

Trevi Fountain, 1,936 images, 656,699 points

The project “Building Rome in a Day” reconstructs entire cities from crowdsourced photos, collecting millions of images uploaded to Flickr, computing viewpoints to build a 3D digital replica of Roma in one day.

What’s fascinating is that each photo, captured by different individuals, serves as a piece of a larger puzzle, where snapshots are added to the bigger picture, creating something far greater than the sum of parts. Cameras function as distributed storage units, each capturing a fragment of reality from a unique perspective.

Beyond just a snapshot of Rome, it is an ever-evolving mosaic that spans time. Photos serve as historical markers, and as more are added, the model creates a living timeline that bridges Rome’s past, present, and future.

Reference: [1]https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/rome/

Looking Outwards 01

Stroboscopic Photography, transformed by Professor Harold Eugene Edgerton[1] from a laboratory instrument into a common device in the 1930s, developed into a technique that captures motion by breaking it into stages. Using a flashing light source during a long exposure, it freezes multiple movements in a single frame. The magic lies in the timing—of the flash, the motion, and the exact press of the shutter—making each shot a blend of unpredictability, but that’s part of the charm.

Yet, it’s often used to capture human movement, but there are many others around that move. If I had the opportunity, I’d capture the subtle movements of plants and cells—motions often invisible to the naked eye. I’m also curious about adding a second flash to see how it might alter.

Reference:
[1] https://www.kalliopeamorphous.com/stroboscopic-photographs-1
[2] https://zidans.ru/blogs/blog/StroboscopicPhotography?lang=en

Looking Outwards 2 – Pierre Huyghe Variants (2022)

Variants (2022) is an ongoing site specific installation by Pierre Huyghe in Kistefos, Norway. Link to Variants: https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/473018/pierre-huyghevariants/

The techs used here seems way beyond my range of knowledge but the work and visuals are very beautiful. Huyghe built this bio-machinery ecosystem (?) in a sculpture park. The screen in the picture above displays a scanned simulation of the environment. He has multiple sensors that inputs the data of the soil toxicity, water levels, solar levels, the wind, movements of animals and so on into the simulation (the simulation can also be manipulated and navigated). The simulation is then incorporated into a digital network, and AI is used to generate mutations onto this simulated network (mentioned Dall-E and another AI that I can’t make sense of due to his strong French accent. He starts talking about this from the 3:08 minutes mark) and the simulation starts to grow and transform on its own. (Whether the mutations are random or not he does not say, but they seem way too conforming to his aesthetics and themes to be entirely random)

What’s interesting to me is that he also makes the mutations come true in the actual physical environments of this installation. I have no idea how he’s doing this, and I quote him from the interview that “once in a while…the mutations in the digital simulations *somehow*” go out and is implemented, manifesting in the physical world. These affect the place loop back to the sensors and the scanners and so there’s a constant changing and growing feedback loop. He also says towards the end of this segment (around 4:52) that the camera/scanner is probably also controlled and manipulated by an AI and thus the way the environment is captured also changes over time.

I’m mostly interested in his feedback loop that changes the environment (I do feel like the fact that someone may have to manually implement the mutations takes away from the project a little), and the (?)emergent(?) mutations he does in the digital simulation. It feels like playing God to a certain extent.

Interview and intro to his works:

Looking Outwards 1

Hi this is Vincent.

Weird one but it’s what I can think of— I spent a lot of time driving over the Summer for work, and it had me thinking about how roadside architecture & road markings are consistent patterns. Kind of similar to Midi notes. And I was thinking about how to, without having synestisia, train yourself to have the same response to your brain to a visual patten as an audible one (music). Had some idea about if machine vision in self driving cars that’s already got datasets made to read those lines (poles, signs, etc.) could be repurposed to express them as music-audio.

Looking Outwards 02

This piece by Jay Vidyarthi uses a strap wrapped around a participant’s chest to measure their breathing. This breathing is then translated into various sound patterns, including sound effects, music, and recordings of people speaking. Other than the sound feedback from their breathing, the participant is deprived of sensory input to allow them to focus more on the auditory experience. The goal of this piece is to deepen the participant’s meditative experience by having the only input they receive from their environment directly reflect the behavior of their own body, allowing them to be more mindful of it.

Looking Outwards 01

When experimenting with the capture tools in class on Tuesday, one that particularly caught my attention was the extremely sensitive touchpad with a very large number of tracked touch points. One way that I would want to use this tool is to place it on the bed of an axidraw, cover it with a sheet of paper and create a feedback cycle where the movement of the axidraw is dictated by the pressure of the pen held by the axidraw on the touchpad through the paper. If I find a clever way to convert the signal received by the touchpad into commands for the axidraw, I could potentially create a really interesting feedback loop.

https://www.synaptics.com/products/touchpad-family/touchpad-product

This isn’t the same as the touchpad you had but I was struggling to find that specific one online and this one has all of the same important features as the one in class.