A glass wall is at once an unseen divide and a bridge of layered depth, allowing two worlds to mingle and merge. This stems from the dual properties of glass—reflection and transmission. If equipped with a polarizing camera (an instrument that captures light from a specific direction), interesting effects can emerge. Through this project, I aim to capture the subtle interactions between people on opposite sides of the glass.
Inspiration
One sunny autumn afternoon, after swimming, I stood outside the glass wall of the pool and was struck by the scene on the glass. I captured this moment on my phone. The glass seemed to merge the indoor and outdoor spaces seamlessly. The transparency of the glass determines the visibility of indoor people, events, and scenes, while the reflectivity decides how much of the outdoor world is visible. Thus, the indoor and outdoor spaces interact along this boundary.
Capture System
The polarized camera allows me to select the light entering my lens, choosing between transmitted or reflected light from the glass.
I started with a DIY “polarized camera” (two Sony Alpha a6000 mirrorless digital cameras + two sheets of polarizing filter), creating a setup that allows free rotation of the polarized film to form a “colorized polarized camera.” Each time a door opens, the sound in the video toggles between the indoor and outdoor spaces (throughout the 4:27 video, this toggle happens 7 times, and the door of the space “switches” 7 times).
I placed a recording device inside to capture interior sounds (this device was even noticed by the girl at the beginning of the video). Outside, I recorded video at the same spot using my DIY polarized camera, aligning the exterior visuals and sounds. To synchronize the interior and exterior sounds, I tapped the glass while inside—this tapping, cut from the final video, enabled me to match the audio from the recording and video devices during post-production.
Next, I captured another piece using the Blackfly S BFS-U3-51S5P monochrome polarized camera. This involved (1) positioning the camera so that reflections of the road on the glass aligned with the pool lanes, (2) recording people on both sides of the glass, (3) exporting the video, and (4) using a GitHub package to separate images from different angles, selecting the two with the highest contrast.
Spatial Illusions
“Aligning the road and the pool lanes” by design created an illusion: it looked as though people were swimming on the road, or as if those in swimsuits were walking on it. When a person appeared in the center of the image, it became hard to tell if they were coming from the pool or the forest. Over time, I believe you’ll develop your own way of distinguishing between indoor and outdoor figures. Here’s mine: (1) From left to right, do they transition from clear to blurry, or vice versa? (2) Are they wearing a swimsuit? (Shh!)
Later, I conducted an experiment: I tinted the black pixels in the indoor image blue, and the outdoor black pixels red. Then, I linearly combined the overlapping pixels, dynamically blending people and activities in both spaces over time through computer rendering.
Tips (If you’d like to try capturing people on glass using a polarized filter, here are a few insights):
Angle: Direct reflections can be challenging to capture. The closer the camera angle is to the glass, the better the outdoor reflection image.
Time of Day: Midday, with the sun directly overhead, is optimal for capturing both indoor and outdoor scenes. In the afternoon, the bright outdoor light can overpower indoor details, while in the early morning and evening, indoor light dominates, and reflections weaken.
Challenges
Despite bringing plenty of backup batteries, the two Sony cameras ran out of power at different rates, resulting in videos with slightly different lengths.
Weather! Passing clouds affected the current image quality. Clear sunlight and clean glass were essential, as was keeping the polarized film spotless.
People were unpredictable. Sometimes I’d arrive with my cameras and tripod, only to find no one swimming. Other times, swimmers would be there, but no one would pass on the street. Occasionally, someone would walk through the pool, but no one swam! This required patience and frequent visits to the glass wall.
Reflection
Compared to my DIY color polarized camera with audio, the professional polarizer produced much clearer images (likely due to differences in filter quality). But my version added color and sound, which brought their own value.
Surprisingly, capturing black-and-white images on glass actually enhanced the spatial illusion, as losing color information removes one of the clues distinguishing the two spaces.
Glass is fascinating—it’s an invisible boundary through which people see each other, yet it’s also thick enough to host stories on both sides, allowing both to unfold simultaneously.
Here’s a shot of me working with the Blackfly S BFS-U3-51S5P camera!
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)
This project was really fun in a lot of ways and a big challenge in several other ways. I had to drop off many side bits to the project that were unanticipated, but I learned a lot about the pains of mixing so many channels of sound.
Binaural Mic – Needs two microphone xlr inputs. Plugging into a mixer with a mic and instrument will not suffice as it needs phantom power to go to both inputs
Ambisonic Mic – tends to be on the quieter side
Wind is impossible to avoid when going 40mph on a boat – with windshields for all mics.
Setup includes:
Equipment:
Presonus Interface, LOTS OF TAPE, binaural microphone, ambisonic microphone, windcaps , two usbc cables and a dongle
Software: Audacity, Max MSP, Ableton Live 11 Suite
Big hurdle in initial recording – the zoom recorder cannot be moved at all or all of it’s setting reset and recording has to be restarted. Very inconvenient but vital for it to function properly.
First Recording: Not much recorded in totality on the boat unfortunately – not the most efficient use of my time. Having to switch back and forth between which microphone to use wasn’t very efficient.
Failed max patches: Learning the max plugins for ambisonic decoding was too steep of a learning curve for me to do with the time alotted. I think that will still be a future project of having audio the listener can spatially pan themselves, but the project instead turned into figuring out how to capture essence instead of exactly replicating things.
Went out a second time and got much better results. Recorded using two programs simultaneously(Audacity and Ableton).
Learned -what metadata is – in order to have the files be read by by the zoom ambisonics software – the metadata has to be edited to decode the file. Many conversion issues between audacity, ableton and this other software.
settled on 5.1 – stereo mixdown
Conclusion: I have successfully recorded a lot of the atmosphere of the boat, but capturing the most accurate spatialization has been a pain. There’s still a lot of work to be done with leveling the audio, but I did what I could. There was a push and pull of me wanting to accurately represent the audio and making something that feels engaging for the listener.
In this project, I was interested in going through my recorded memories and comparing the last photo of each month in my camera roll to my self-defined idea of “last”.
This project came about because I gravitated towards capturing the “moment of”. Many of the inspiration projects I came back to were projects like:
Which was a collection of photographs that took a picture every time a person went throughthe subway turnstile.
However, I felt that these references were more focused on the person than the event, and I was more interested in the event of capture.
I came across this long-term project called “Leaving and Waving” by Deanna Dikeman, where she captured photographs as she waved goodbye and drove away from visiting her parents.
“a 14-meter long installation that runs down the middle of The Wellcome Trust Gallery at the British Museum. Its central theme is the dominance of the biomedical approach to health and illness within Western societies, here focused mainly on the use of medication.”
This made me interested like “the lasts”. Recent events in my life that have made me hyperaware of “the last” are COVID, moving homes, moving out of homes, college, deaths, illness, the election, and traveling. I was interested to see if any of these significant lasts I felt were reflected in what I’ve chosen to document over the years.
The form of Dikeman projects inspired me, but since I don’t have 10 years to make this project, so I instead turned to photos I already had to see if I could document something similar in my life.
My project statement follows:
As a whole, there is this culture of obsession around “the last”. Concepts that come to mind are the “last words”, “last meals, “last goodbyes” and “last day”. The concept of “the last” accompanies the realization of death, the ultimate “the last” in everyone’s life. The concept of “the last” often thought of as inherently special and sentimental.
Through this project, I wanted to explore “the last” in my life through a formal organization of the last photos of every month in my camera roll over the last four years. I wanted to find out what life looks like when I am just presented with a collection of photos of my “lasts”.
Process:
Originally I wanted to see if this was a task I could automate, so I went to ChatGPT (lol) for help to see if I could use the machine to sort out the images in my camera roll for me.
This proved to be difficult because of the sheer size of my camera roll and also probably some privacy issues that I couldn’t understand enough to fix.
She was running for a while before she gave up and crashed
So instead I decided to comb through the photos myself.
Process and restrictions:
The rules I defined for my process were:
Strictly the last photo/video of every month for the past 4 years.
All media, including screenshots, would count.
The process:
List out the dates
List out the last remembered memory associated with that month (Using my journals, calenders, and notes app).
Pick out the last recorded photo in my camera roll
The Results:
Final Thoughts:
To be honest, I wasn’t that surprised to find that the last things I decided to document in my life when I was unaware of the future were completely unrelated to the more significant “last” events.
My project concluded with the idea that actual “lasts” in our lives don’t matter as much as what we perceive our “lasts” are. Documenting my life in my true “the lasts” didn’t feel as significant as culturally I’d been raised to believe.
Improvements:
I originally wanted to document the last photo of every day, but that proved to be a longer endeavor than I dared to partake in. If I could figure out the code to automate that process, those would be my next steps.
It would also be interesting to see the first and last photos of every day (yes I take that many photos my camera roll/hard disk is insane) and see how my project changes from there.
I also wondered if it would have been more effective if I focused on the self (ie. last selfie etc). Perhaps for the next update, I will explore this as well.
This project went a little out of my control and is all over the place. It ended up consisting of 3 parts:
(1) the measure of blinks over 2 hours, (2) the measure of heartbeats via ultrasound, (3) eulerian magnification to show wrist pulses.
Though they use different tools and focus on different subjects, the main idea behind them is relatively uniform: discarding arbitrary / artificial units of time, to use the body as a natural clock, and explore our bodily portrayal and experience of time.
Scripts and video process files can be found in a google drive link at the end of this documentation.
Blinks!
Credit: Thank you Golan for the idea of creating the grid based on the duration between the blinks! So sorry I forgot to mention during the presentation.
This grid used ffmpeg. The blinks were identified and cropped using the python libraries scipy.spatial (https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/tutorial/spatial.html) and imutils (https://pypi.org/project/imutils/).
Process:
I was able to get this very cool phone holder
Unfortunately, I ended up changing the setup because I had trouble sitting still for 2 hours just staring at my face in the phone. The phone’s position blocked me from seeing anything in front of me, and if I lower my eyes the blinks have a high rate of going undetected. So I switched to using the magic arm to set the phone right behind my computer’s camera, and watched videos for 2 hours on my computer. There still was a few lowered eyes and more shifting face positions.
This is far from finished. The cropping takes a long time, as of yesterday midnight, it has only gotten to “2518.6283333333336 to 2522.2250000000004″(around the 1200th blink). We have the timestamps of around 3500 blinks in total. The grid contains only 362 blinks because the cropping tool used failed to identify many of the eyes (choosing to crop my eyebrows, a pimple on my cheek for some reason and sometimes my nose). Requires further improvement.
Additionally, it would be great if I can dynamically crop the eyes (tracking the eye’s position so it always stays at the center of the cropped frame). However, the processing would take too much time.
Alternative capture method:
https://openprocessing.org/sketch/2440791
This is a p5.js script I made based on Golan’s Face Metrics code, it downloads the timestamps and the webcam recording once you exit the page.
Ultrasound heart
I thought this was one of the more interesting ones, you can see the valves moving .
Here is four views in a grid:
Single movement:
I was then able to extract 220 videos of heart movements from a 5 minute video by calculating the average intensity of each frame (how bright each frame is, 0=black, 255=white, 100-150=grey) and finding peaks in the intensity, therefore mimicking heartbeats. The above us a single movement of the heart.
Personally I think it looks less intriguing than the eye grid. Mainly due to them mostly having the same length and movement.
Pulse
I captured the pulse by processing videos using eulerian color magnification. The video below explains it very well
Rather than tracking individual pixels, it tracks the variations in fixed grid cells. Basic processes: YIQ color space –> Gaussian Pyramid Level of each frame –> Magnify the filtered Pyramid Levels –> Add magnified levels to original frames –> bring back to RGB.
Honestly: I only know that this is how the code is structured accordingly. I have no idea how the theory behind it works.
Setup
Initially I got videos like this:
Process recordings with script. Make grids as needed with ffmpeg.
I tested different alpha levels
Tried making a 20 minutes recording to get the heart rate. But I didn’t anticipate how hard it is to keep your arm still for 20 minutes. The intensity processing based on this was disappointing.
Pulse graph via intensity:
Still, I am so excited to have got this to work.
Google drive documentation: TBA
End notes:
Would love to play with the ultrasound more, its so unsettling seeing your (processed) insides in real time. Its amazing how tangible our insides actually are but we go about unaware of them most of the time. Suddenly they’re extremely prominent and heavy.
The eulerian magnification is amazing. I really like the 2×3 grid with all the pulses moving together. I wonder if I can set up a larger scene, i.e., a silent gathering around the table with participants unmoving, and see how their blood pulses align by processing the video so that only a small frame of skin is magnified on each person. Possible final project?
The idea was to have things in my house that I could get to “tick” all tick on the same tempo as my body. Examples of a “tick”: a light on a smoke-detector blinks, a curtain sways, a hinge creaks, a faucet drips.
Why these two tempos are important:
The heartbeat or breath rate are the body’s cycles that indicate it’s alive. These are fairly regular cycles, but there are some that are more irregular (ex. walking vs. not walking).
The house’s ticks indicate the house also has some kind of natural rhythm (ex. a clock on a wall). Some of the rhythms indicate a human is living inside (ex. stepping on a floorboard causes noise), and so may be more irregular (but I might creak the same floorboard when I get out of bed the same time each day).
I think the cycles of these two things are comparable.
For the project:
The person in this would be myself– or more “my body” than “my-self”. The quiddity is the specific rhythms to this body, and/or marks the body leaves on it’s environment. (A rhythm of the body may be a heartbeat. A mark made by the body may be the faucet dripping- that would not happen if I had not just run the sink.)
If a body can leave marks on a home, then the cycles are also linked / influence each other. I wanted to explore the question of “What happens/what does it mean if these are 1:1“? I’m assuming that means there’s no more barrier between body and house.
Part of that question is: “Why are they linked“? Overtime, if you inhabit a house enough, it’s changing you as much as you’re changing it. You automatically duck under a low-hang, you know where to reach for light switches in the dark. This is the house changing you. Overtime, you indent the middle of stairs and smudge the wall around the light switches where you feel for them in the dark. This is you changing the house. Given enough time, these rates of changing each other might become the same/synonymous.
There’s an assumption that in the relationship between a person and their house, the person is the one with agency, and the house is passively changing in response. Say that isn’t true, or that the opposite is true: “What happens if the house has all the agency, and the human-body is passive“? I think places can be sentient in a way of having their own agency. There are some scenarios where they can feed off a person inhabiting them.
The third possible answer to “why are they linked?” is that: You are not the same thing as your body. Your body is a thing you inhabit, much like a house. “Why is the end of the skin the end of your body, if you havesimilar levels of agency over and privacy within your body as your house?”
Examples where the body marks the house, and the house influences the body.
The thing that I am producing is sort of a depiction of the fantasy where one or some of these possible answers happen.
Output, Attempt 1:
I spent the majority of time trying to get data from a FitBit. I started there because it could give me sleep stages on top of heart rate. This sucked:
Demo .gif of the app.Screenshots of the issue. Also sometimes the 1 second interval is not in 1 second increments.
These are examples of requesting my live heart bpm via the FitBit Web API. It does not give me live data and it’s finnicky. I had to figure out requesting and verifying tokens via the url to get permission from the app- it was a lot of work and I do not know why it is like this, the behavior is unacceptable.
Output: F-it, arduino:
After that did not work, here’s what I could get done with an Arduino in like 10 days:
~ a schematic.
I figured syncing heart-beats to something would be my best bet, although I also have tested a BMP280 air pressure sensor & a DS18B20 temperature sensor (both are Arduino inputs) to capture beathing. The air pressure sensor gave an output that’d be useable under good circumstances.
I chose to go with a faucet dripping out of all the “ticks” I’ve mentioned previously because it’s a subtle life-sign, it easily matches the type of pulse I get from a heart-beat, and doesn’t have the same definite connotation as something like a clock.
Here’s the thing installed:
Here is a final-output video with it:
Final thoughts:
I think this went okay, even though the final vision that was in my head is not present here, and I didn’t do everything I wanted. There are also approx 7 extra pages of notes overthinking it, so this was a good thumbnail to have explored the fuller idea further, and to discover where technical limitations are. (Link to my notes, although it’s mostly incoherent).
I think this project connects to other ideas I care about exploring– I wanted to see a depiction where “I” am specifically “my-body” and not “my-self“. I usually ask to see some kind of dispersal or relocating of that “self”. I like that this condenses many hours of work into something very tiny & unimportant (if the solenoid was quiet). The previous project I’d tried to do for this class was on technophony: transcribing background-noises into nonsense-text. These projects are both essentially about giving human agency to the environments humans inhabit.
Because my project is similar to some other peoples’: I do not care about heart-rate in terms of tracking or counting. I care about this body-rhythm because it indicates life.
For this project, I used TouchDesigner to create an interactive installation. Lines with the spring feature are projected onto a wall, and a dancer performs in front of this projection. Her movements, especially her hand motions, cause the lines to respond and move.
Workflow:
I used TouchDesigner to create an interactive installation that captures and responds to a dancer’s movements. I created two invisible balls in TouchDesigner that follow her hands. Each ball has a specific size and weight, acting as the force that moves the projected lines on the wall.
(TouchDesigner patch)
To capture her movements accurately in low light, I used the Kinect Azure’s depth-image feature. This depth data feeds into TouchDesigner, where it tracks her hand movements and moves the invisible balls. These balls, in turn, cause the lines to respond dynamically. Each line is made up of multiple points, which I carefully adjusted to create smooth, natural interactions. I also tuned the spring constant to make sure the lines have a fluid feel as they move.
(System Diagram)
(Set-up Picture)
For the final piece, I filmed the interaction with a DSLR camera, capturing how the lines and dancer create a unique, expressive performance.
Final Work:
Discussion:
I chose an interactive projection for this project because it brings the dancer’s essence—the unique energy and fluidity of her movements—into a visible, tangible form. The interactive element responds in real-time, allowing her movements to directly shape and influence the projected lines. This immediate response captures the intangible qualities of her performance, making the interaction between the dancer and the projection feel almost like a conversation.
This interaction between the physical and virtual spaces adds an extra layer of depth to the performance, as the projected lines become an extension of her movements. The projection also allows viewers to experience the dancer’s expressive style beyond what a simple recording could convey, as her motions actively sculpt the environment around her.
As a landscape architect, one of my guiding principles in design has been to try to honor the spirit of the place, known as genius loci. In order to find the spirit of the place, you must find what makes the place “special.” You must find the unique, celebrated, and cherished aspects of that place.
The concept of genius loci is not too different from the concept of quiddity, for both concepts underline the idea that things (such as places, people, or objects) have a what-ness, a fundamental essence, or soul.
Perhaps my keen interest in place and my efforts in discovering a place’s soul has made me interested in landscape maintenance workers, the keepers or guardians of the place’s atmosphere. According to classical Roman religion, the genius loci shapes and guards the atmosphere of the place and influences those who inhabit or visit it. I think this is exactly what maintenance workers do. They actively tend to, care for, and sustain landscapes. People may not pay much attention to how this careful and consistent work shapes a place and probably don’t realize that this work may be a necessary part of the place’s identity.
The place I am capturing is the landscape upon which Carnegie Mellon University is set. My subjects in this study are three landscape maintenance workers on CMU’s campus: Mario, Nate, and Steve. In this study, I am not attempting to capture the essence of my subjects- as that calls for a different kind of inquiry, rather, I am trying to capture the essential work that they do in maintaining the soul of campus.
NateSteveMario
References:
An important precedent in this project is Ansel Adams landscape photography work, which was used in Sierra club campaigns and books as well as by the National Park Service to justify and support efforts in maintaining these landscapes. Adam’s work has been greatly influential and important in environmental conservation efforts. However, Adams’ static, unpeopled images of landscapes may have contributed to an idea in the cultural psyche that landscapes are timeless and untouched by humans. While I’m not suggesting that the landscaped areas on CMU’s campus are the same as the landscapes Ansel Adams focused on, in my work I am trying to both highlight the dynamic nature of the landscape and the role of humans in creating and/or maintaining landscapes. We may think of nature as a refuge from the artificial or man-made world, but really, most of the ‘natural’ spaces we inhabit are actively shaped by people.*On a side note, Adams’ Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar do show people working landscapes, it’s interesting to learn that these photos were published in a book titled “Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans”
I have been reading Jenny Odell’s, How to Do Nothing, and through her I learned about Maintenance Art. Odell talks about how it’s important to realize that our world needs maintenance and care, just as much or more than it needs productivity and innovation. I think we would also do better to focus on care, repair and maintenance. Our culture is so focused on the new – we have a novelty bias… how could we better appreciate circularity and maintenance processes?
Through Jenny Odell I learned about Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969! I watched an interview of Ukeles’ where she says, “I choose maintenance and I call it art. I call necessity art. Which actually you could say, that’s bullshit. So what? I name it art.” I later learned that she has been the Artist in Residence of the New York City Department of Sanitations since 1977, and that she did a project called Touch Sanitationin which she personally met with, shook hands and said “thank you for keeping New York City alive” to 8500+ sanitation workers. She also recorded some conversations with the workers and hoped to use her art to increase positive views of those workers. I am inspired by Ukeles’ work because my main objective is to draw positive attention to the work being done by landscape maintenance workers at CMU whose work may not be noticed or appreciated. I want to make their work more visible and for it to be celebratory. Ideally, I would want someone viewing my work to be more appreciative or at least aware of the landscape maintenance work.
In trying to find ways to analyze, understand and celebrate the movements of individuals in space, I’ve been looking at NYT Athletics graphics. Specifically, I’ve been looking at 2021 articles about athletes: Simone Manuel, Sunisa Lee, Dalilah Muhammad, and Adam Ondra. I really like the subtle animations that highlight key movements, positions, and the smooth transitions between views. I also like the inclusion of 3D models or illustrations of equipment. If I continue this project further, I would like to include 3D illustrations of the landscape tools and equipment that the landscape maintenance team use. It would be interesting to visualize the techniques and dexterity that is necessary to do the job efficiently and effectively.
Finally, there are also influences from Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s “Time and Motion” efficiency and ergonomic studies. I’m not particularly interested in the efficiency of movement in my subject’s landscape maintenance work. I’m more interested in the fact that they are performing skilled physical acts on the landscape in such ways that shape it. My analysis of their movements is not intended to point out efficiency, rather it is to heighten visibility and showcase skill and impact.
Although I didn’t use the tilt shift for my final captures, I was hoping to use that technique after being inspired by Keith Loutit’s Metal Heart.
Capture System and Workflow:
My workflow involved a lot of coordination with the landscape maintenance team on campus, specifically with my three subjects, and mostly with Nate, who is head gardener at CMU. This coordination was mostly done via email.
First, I needed to find someone to reach out to. After some digging, I found the email of head gardener Nate Holback. I wrote him an email and described my project’s needs and intentions. Although it took a full week for Nate to reply, I was really happy when he did respond because he was willing to participate and coordinate. Overall, the landscape maintenance workers I reached out to were positive and liked the idea of my project! This made me excited and motivated.
Before the first day of capture I had the following equipment with me:
1 Sony camera recorder, 1 tilt-shift lens, 2 tripods, 2 iPhones, 2 iPhone holsters
What I wanted to do was capture the landscape using time-lapse, tilt-shift videography… I had the iPhones as backup because I have no experience with the tilt-shift lens and was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get it right.
Day 1: I met Nate and Mario Friday, November 1st at 8:00am on Forbes Ave. in front of Cyert Hall. They were about to blow leaves there. I ran around to try to find a high-up window or rooftop from which to capture them, but couldn’t find one quickly enough. I set up in the best place I could. They were waiting for me to set up my cameras before they got started so I didn’t want to delay them. I ended up following Mario around for the next two and a half hours. He was super friendly and gave me an idea of where to record Nate from when he mowed the Tepper lawn. Mario showed me a picture on his phone taken from the 4th floor of Tepper, where you can see the whole of the Tepper Quad. It’s a great view, he noted. He also suggested I capture his snow clearing in the winter! This sounds super fun to me and if time allows I would like to do this in the future.
I tried using tilt shift photography, but ultimately it was too complicated to pull off and there were more urgent things to coordinate since the landscapers needed to get on with their work.
Day 2: Saturday, November 2nd. I spent the afternoon scoping out spots for capture and emailing those to Nate, see coordination below:
Day 3: On Monday November 4th I got up in the dark to make my way over to Tepper and set up inside Tepper to record Nate. I went inside Tepper to set up the tripods and camera from a 4th floor window. Unfortunately the room I was planning to set up in was locked, and my keycard didn’t have access. A kind maintenance worker let me in (I was carrying a lot of stuff, backpack, tripods, camera). Just after I finished setting up (right before Nate was going to start) a lady came into the room, asked me how I got in and told me that it was a private space (no one was there…) She seemed very upset about me being inside and asked me a bunch of questions. I told her I was doing an art project for a CFA class, that I was coordinating with the landscaper below, that I could share coordination emails with her if she wanted, and that I didn’t know the space was private because when I had been there on Saturday it was open and I just strolled in. She pressed me on who let me in that morning, was it a cleaning person? she asked. I explained that I was carrying a lot of things, so the person who let me in was just helping me out. I was worried that the kind maintenance worker who let me in might be in trouble. I still worry about this and I hope my project has not gotten her in trouble.
Day 4: I greeted Steve with a handshake bright and early on Tuesday morning (November 5th… what a day…) I set up a tripod on the balcony of the MMCH rooftop. Steve started mowing the sloped lawn by the tennis courts at 8:00 am sharp. My movements on the balcony made the tripod unstable and the video unstable. Whoops. If I capture Steve again, I will make sure I don’t step out onto the balcony while the camera is recording. By 9:00 am I was packed up and walked over to my polling place and then anxiety ensued.
Day 5+: Media Editing over the course of multiple days. Note: this is a study, a work in progress. I would have loved to do more with video editing and animation. Alas, I ran out of time. I’m going to work on this until the deadline, and maybe more if I get encouragement. Might want to continue this project into the final project of this class. I think there’s a lot here! More ideas for sure!
Form and Content:
I think that timelapse videos of the landscape work being done helps one appreciate the impact more. Seeing a before and after of the space is cool, but seeing the maintenance movements, the action is much more compelling. I think this is particularly true when it comes to leaf blowing, where the before and after is so clear. The lawn mowing is more frequent and the traces are visible when you look at the lawn. A brief note about seeing clean-ups in videos or in motion- There’s a lot of movies (like Mary Poppins) or animations (like Fantasia) that involve clean-up. I think there’s something compelling about watching something be cleaned, maintained or tidied.
Originally I wanted to use a tilt-shift, but this was a bit of a challenge for me in this case because I wanted my subject to always be in focus. I did get some tilt-shift captures of Nate but they weren’t very successful.
I think that if I do more of this, I would like to capture more leaf blowing, because the before/after is really striking and apparent. It’s also compelling to see it done over time lapse because the traces and changes are easier to understand.
I would also be interested in documenting winter maintenance such as snow plowing as Mario suggested.
Evaluation:
I really enjoyed this project and having my subjects as active, coordinated participants actually made the whole experience better and more interesting. I felt connected to the people whose work I was documenting and I felt grateful to be able to connect with them in this way because it is true that I appreciate their work. Something I realized while working as a landscape architect is that so much of the success of ‘your design’ depends on how it’s maintained, or tended to. As a designer trying to consider the lifecycle of my design propositions, I also think it’s important to think about how design decisions will create new cycles of maintenance and impact.
My process helps reveal that most people pass through these spaces quickly, mostly limiting themselves to moving on paved pathways. The landscape maintenance workers inhabit these spaces in a different way. They move through every square foot of them. They get to the edges, they understand the shape of the space. They cover the ground.
Personally, I felt like I needed to honor these people and their work. Show them in a flattering light. Not make them look silly. I have followed up with Mario to share a quick video edit. I still need to follow up with Nate and Steve with their captures. Having real people involved, who are not friends of mine makes me feel like I have a responsibility to do a good job. This makes me want to re-do, continue and refine this project. I am happy with the way this exploration has gone so far, but there is much more I could do to achieve my broader vision.
Also, this project reveals not only a person in time, but a place in time. In my time-lapse clips, you see the sky change. The shadows change. It just depends how fast you play the video. I would like to do more of these eventually. I have ideas for a more ambitious version of this project already. I am also interested in recording other landscape maintenance in Pittsburgh, like parks or plazas.
