TypologyMachineWIP – Page 2 – Experimental Capture

VW W.I.P. Typology Machine

I decided I wanted to do something with audio as my jumping off point. Currently my favorite idea is a typology of non-human voices in public spaces (ex. loudspeakers, elevators, busses). And then if they are all collected together I can let them talk to each other. My other favorite idea was a typology of room-tones or A/C, vents, and pipes. Like, subtle background noises. I have been unsure if I’d rather begin with concept or with technology, but I think at this point, I would like to find the piece of tech that most compliments the loudspeaker idea.

I am part way through reading a book that’s giving some good ideas, and I have attached a pdf of some of my notes thinking : typology notes.

Edit: After having the meetings, I also have this idea: trying to get “noise pollution”-type sounds to be able to be transcribed by a speech-to-text program into words or phonetics. I like the idea of using “noise pollution” type sounds because these sounds are all caused by humans, but ignored/disliked by humans, and they are very subtle but very constant. I can see one vision of this where the end result is : A video of the Object that makes the noise, and the video’s audio is the noise the Object makes, run through speech-to-text, and then the transcription is read out (either by synthetic or human voice) in sync with the video.

3D Object Material Capture

I took interest in this study done on splitting specular and diffuse with real images and wanted to incorporate it into my typology machine.

Goal

As the diagram above shows, I want to create a system where I have a collection of photos and a model of the object, and it outputs 3d capture of the object with its respective material properly mapped.

Due to my lack of knowledge in ML, I feel like it would be difficult to expect the system to do the mapping on its own. As in, I initially want the system to distinguish from the photos 1. the object is composed of how many different parts and 2. which material property matches with which respective parts. However, this process might need to be done manually.

Target Object

What I really wanted to explore in this study is how can I capture an object composed of different components. Most real objects are made up of different parts with different material properties. Using the scissor example, the blade will have a higher specular value than the handle because it is more shiny and bounces off more specular light.

Therefore, for my subject of capture I wanted to work with my lotion bottles, which has a mix of different material types.

Skin Tone Variation Typology Machine

The main idea is to create a typology documenting the variation in skin tones across different parts of the human body.

I plan to use a photography setup that includes standardized lighting and camera settings to capture photos of different body parts: the face, hands, feet, etc. This ensures that the lighting and exposure are consistent across all photos, emphasizing differences in skin tone, brightness, contrast etc.

I plan to use image processing software, extract RGB values or other color data from each image. These values will then be plotted on a color grid, showing the skin tone range for each person.

I plan to present the collection of these colors in grid format for comparison between individuals, highlighting the diversity in skin tones even within one person. They can be sorted or ordered by greatest to least contrast, color hues, or something else that becomes apparent from the data

An example for what it might look like for one person:

Schenley Bench – Typology Machine WIP

I am interested in places and the different things that happen within them through time. I’m especially interested in parks because I want to understand why people go to them and what they are doing in them. As people living in 2024, we can get pretty much everything we need indoors, in controlled environments. So why do people outside? What do they do there? And what about the other forms of life in those spaces? Do we interact with other species outside? How so? How do people and animals move through the same space?

Faced with these questions and this typology capture assignment, I want capture a single place from a single view over a period of several days. The place I would like to do this is on a Schenley Park trail. The stretch of the trail that I would like to focus on has a stone bench which has called my attention before. Once I saw that someone had left a laptop on the bench. The next day, the laptop was gone and a note was in its place. I was running past it and didn’t stop to look at the note. I’ve been wondering about that bench and the things that happen around it since then. So, this spot is my intended subject. I am only beginning to think about the set up of my capture system. I’ve outlined some thoughts (with images) below.

What tools do I need?

How will I set up the capturing system?

option 1: mount camera to stake spike tripod?

option 2: tie camera to nearby tree

How might I assemble my recordings? I’m interested in the idea of different things happening in the same place through time. Since I read Watchmen as a teenager, I’ve been haunted by the idea that “things have their shape in time, not space alone. Some marble blocks have statues within them, embedded in their future.”

Watchmen – Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, John Higgins

One of my favorite examples of illustrating a place through time and the life and actions within it comes from Richard McGuire’s Here, a book I think about often.

I wonder if I could juxtapose videoclips in a similar way to show this space through time. I wonder what events I might capture and how I could tell their stories.

How could I make my capture plan and system more interesting?

Typology Machine Work-in-Progress

Concept:

I’m interested in recording fruits or food decaying in time-lapse and transforming them into a slit-scan format for the final works.

Slit-Scan:

Definition: Slit-scan is a photographic technique that uses a narrow slit to capture a subject, resulting in a variety of image effects.

I’m choosing this imaging technique because I believe it’s a creative and effective way to represent the concept of time, which is often used for capturing time-lapses or movements.

Slit scan - Interactive installation :: Behance Myrto Amorgianou

Experiments in Slit-scan Photography : 7 Steps (with Pictures) - Instructables Erik Boertjes

Alvaro & Ishikawa

James (Jung-Hoon) Seo

Martin Hilpoltsteiner

Process Plan:

Set up a shooting booth with multiple iPhones to capture time-lapse videos or images of various fruits and foods decaying over a 1-2 week period. Then, apply post-production processes to create the slit-scan effect.

Questions to resolve:

The post-production technique: Coding, After Effects, or 3D photogrammetry? This will also determine whether I should capture the process using video or still image formats.
The type of slit-scan effect: Strip, video cube, or subject-shaped?

Thanks: https://flong.com/archive/texts/lists/slit_scan/index.html

Typology of: My Weight when I’m Happy

Typology Work in Progress:

I want to track my weight throughout the week with the things (objects, people, ideas) that make me happy. I will then use a calorie tracking app (prob myfitnesspal) to track my weight and the caloric equivalent of my “happiness” that day.

The how:

I plan to carry a scale around with me for around a week and weigh myself every time something makes me happy with the thing that makes me happy. Then I will use a calorie tracking app to log my weight and the object of my happiness with the caloric equivalent using the standard measurement of calorie to fat (3,500 calories to 1 pound of fat).

Idea Inspiration and the Why:

This idea came about with a realization I made when scrolling through Tiktok and coming across a video made by a fitness influencer who talked about how they used to track the calories in their toothpaste. I realized that people, through apps like myfitnesspal, make typologies every day by tracking their food, calories, and weight.

Weight is a heavy topic for a lot of people, and growing up in my no-filter Korean family, it is definitely a point of stress for me. In redownloading and analyzing my past MyFitnessPal entries, the daily typologies I made diligently throughout my hs and uni years revealed more than just what I ate that day. It revealed more personal and surprising things.

For example:

the state of my mental health
my financial status
my social life
the evolution of my cooking skills
my culture (& the exposure to new ones)

In making my weight and the “consumed” calories arbitrary, I hope to neutralize the negative connotations around the subject. Additionally, in tracking the more positive aspects of my life- I hope that my typology functions similarly to a gratitude journal.

From Class-

Taking pictures every time I measure my weight. Go pro at the level of the scale.

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

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

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

Typology of Pittsburgh Bridges – Proposal/WIP

For my typology, I plan on using the portable (iphone) thermal camera, as well as the built in iphone camera to capture the underside of dilapidated bridges.

My goal is to create a typology of Pittsburgh’s worst bridges that highlights our aging infrastructure and safety concerns.

Background

I came up with the idea for this project after reading this article about the state of steel bridges in the US. They found that over 25 percent of all bridges in the US will collapse by 2050, due to the extreme temperature fluctuation throughout the planet as a result of climate change. I immediately connected this to Pittsburgh, and the Fern Hollow bridge collapse. There are almost 450 bridges within Pittsburgh city limits (446 to be exact) and I found this report from June 2024 that concluded that 15 percent of these bridges are in poor condition and at risk of failure right now.

The next thing I was curious about was whether it was possible with the tools available to the studio to capture and record damage invisible or difficult to see with the naked eye. I learned that (among many other methods) one of the ways to identify weaknesses is using an IR thermal camera. [Jump to Section 3.3]

Method

I plan to standardize the bridge images (as best I can) by stationing myself directly under each bridge, and taking the photo with my phone pointed straight up in an attempt to unify the images and standardize the angle. I will take 2 photos (planned) of each bridge, one with the thermal camera, and one with my iphone camera.

My biggest concern right now is that it’s not going to work! Obviously I am not a structural engineer, and I have no idea if I’ll be able to see the damage even with the thermal camera. My contingency plan if I’m not able to get the thermal camera to work is to create a 3d scan of the underside of the 5-10 of the worst bridges instead, and somehow highlight the structural problems that are visible to the naked eye. That being said, I am very interested in hearing if someone thinks there’s a more effective capture method for this.

Additional Resources:

More about bridge diagnosis methods

Non paywalled article on bridge prognosis

Cause of the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse