Category: Uncategorized

I’ve always found a certain fascination in reflections and comfort in hiding behind a reflection—observing from a space where I’m not directly seen by the subject. There’s something quietly powerful in capturing moments from this hidden vantage point, where the world unfolds without the pressure of interaction. The reflection creates a barrier, a layer between myself and the moment, allowing me to observe without being observed. It offers a sense of safety, distance, and control while still engaging with the world around me.

This project emerged from that same instinct—an exploration of the subtle dynamic between visibility and invisibility,

Self-Glance Runway

For this project, the process was centered on capturing spontaneous human behavior related to this phenomenon—how we, as individuals, instinctively pause to check our reflections when presented with the opportunity.

 

Setting up at Merson Courtyard, just outside the UC building, provided an ideal backdrop. The three windows leading up to the revolving doors created natural “frames” through which passersby could glimpse themselves.

To discreetly capture these candid moments, I placed a DJI Osmo Action 4 camera on a tripod inside, a compact setup that minimized visibility, while a Bushnell Core DS-4K wildlife camera outside caught “behind the scene clips”. I took measures to make the glass more reflective by dimming indoor lights and using movable whiteboards to create subtle, controlled lighting.

     

The footage was taken on 11/07th from approximately 12:3oPM-5:30PM. And edited by hand in Premiere Pro. I wish I somehow made a system to organize these clips with a system instead of manual labor but I also don’t know how accurate it might’ve been especially in a group movement.

Reflecting on this project, I found myself confronting something unexpected. While editing the hours of footage, I felt a strange authority over the people outside the window, watching their lives unfold in these small, unguarded moments. There was something powerful in observing the casual details—how they dressed, who they were with, the lunches they carried—moments they never intended for anyone to see. But toward the end of the footage, I noticed something unsettling as the sun started to set. With the changing light, more of the indoor space I was working in started to reflect through the windows. I hadn’t timed it right; I didn’t anticipate how early the inside would become visible. Suddenly, as I was watching them, I was on display too, exposed to the very people I thought I was quietly observing.

It felt strange, almost as if I had crafted a scene meant to be invisible, only to find myself unexpectedly pulled into it. The dynamic of gaze and surveillance shifted as the light changed, turning the lens back onto me.

Basic idea:

Mapping and rearranging pixels of one image to form another.

Or, in the more ornate words of a friend based on a basic description of the project: “The machine projects the memory of the source image onto its perception of its incoming vision from the new image. Is it hallucinating? Or just trying to interpret the new stimuli in terms of past experiences?”

Questions:

• How much can an image’s constituent pixels be rearranged before it loses its original identity? Where/when does one thing end and another begin?
• Can the ways the pixels are changing reflect the different timelines on which different organisms and systems exist?
• Can Alice finish Project #2 for ExCap on time? 😬
  • (the answer is “yes?* but not to the desired effect”)
  • *for some definition of yes

Inspiration:

Generally, I’m really inspired by media theoretical work from the likes of Hito Steyerl (e.g. poor image), Trevor Paglen (invisible image), Legacy Russell (Glitch Feminism), and Rosa Menkman (Glitch Manifesto). There are also definitely general inspirations from pixel sorting tradition.

Here’s a page out of Menkman’s Glitch Manifesto:

Three topics:

There were 2.5 topics through which I wanted to experiment (none of which I’ve been able to really flesh out yet):

1) Non-human labor of lichen and moss

1a) s1n0p1a x lichen/moss collaboration

2) the story of my friend/housemate Jane and me.

🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱

Non-human labor of lichen and moss:

My original idea around highlighting non-human labor: such as the enduring role of lichen and moss in restoring post-industrial landscapes and ways in which species persist alongside and in spite of human development. Lichen and moss are keystone species/genus that survived Earth’s last major extinctions. They grow slowly over decades, centuries, millenia–existing on a timeline that exceeds our understanding. For this stage/iteration of the project, I wanted to film 1) the bridge/trains/cars of Pittsburgh and 2) lichen and moss; our changes are intertwined. For the site, I chose to film at the Pump House, the site of the 1892 Battle of Homestead–one of the most pivotal and deadly labor struggles in American history. 

Pump House

Pixels of Bridge Mapped to Pixels of Lichen:

Collected video x Collected video:

Lichen on a rock next to the Pump House

Moss/lichen on the wall of the Pump House

Collected video (I took this video) x Sample Image (I did not take these images):

stereoscopic!

I’m not too happy with the results on this one because the images just don’t… look too good? In future iterations I think I need to be more strategic with filming. I think part of it too was not being able to do stereo in macro out in the wild (but I’m trying to work on this! this seems like a good lead for future exploration).

• s1n0p1a x lichen/moss webshop: This idea ties back to the non-human labor of lichen and moss original idea. My original plan involved a webshop selling art (or experiences?) that highlighted non-human labor and attempted to collect fees to donate to environmental organizations. One pressing question was WHAT ART? Stereoscopy relates back to the spectacle, voyeurism, and the desire to own (e.g. curiosity cabinet) and clips/art for sale bring to mind pornographic/erotic content. An idea that came to mind was quite simply combining the two via pixel remapping. Does the Free Model Release Form apply here? Might be good on my end because I’m using nude photos of myself? Even though those pixels were shattered, why do I admittedly feel some reticence with using e.g. a photo of myself unclothed. Should the lichen consent to having their likeness represented in this way? I was intrigued by this kind of intimacy. Least progress was made on this idea, but are some sample image (1st and 3rd were images from online and second was an image I took myself, since I didn’t particularly like any of the macro/stereo lichen shots I took):

The story of my friend/housemate Jane and me: Often when I refer to Jane in conversation with others I call her my “housemate,” but I immediately feel the need to clarify that we’ve also been “friends since 6th grade.” As someone who identifies as aroace and constantly tries to rally against amatonormativity; I feel inept at capturing, in conversations with others, the meaningfulness of our longstanding friendship and the ways in which we live together–sharing meals and mutual support over the years. I wanted to honor a bit of that through this project. Over the years, we’ve changed in some ways, but in many ways we’ve stayed the same.

6th grade (Left: HSV, Right: Lab)

Lab w/ max_size 1024

8th grade Yosemite trip

Recent image together (L: lab on cropped image, R: HSV)

Algorithm:
Reconstruct one image (Image B) using the colors of another (Image A) via mapping pixels to their closest color match according to Lab, HSV, and RGB. (After some texts across images, I found I generally liked results from Lab the best.) Both images are downsized (largest dimension limited to max_size parameter) to reduce computational load. A KD-Tree is built for Image A’s pixels. Each pixel in Image B is then matched to the closest unused pixel in Image A based on color similarity; ideally, every pixel in Image A is used exactly once. It gets pretty computationally heavy at the moment and definitely forced me to think more about the construction, destruction, and general features of media.

Some analysis:

The runtime should be O(nlogn) for building the KDTree and O(m*n) for querying m pixels and iterating over n unused pixels for each query, leading to O(nlogn)+O(m*n).

I documented the results of a couple initial tests and found that for images from my phone setting max_size to

50 yields results in ~0.5s
100 yields results in ~6s
150 yields results in ~35s
200 yields results in about 1.25 minutes

50 was computationally somewhat feasible for generating a live output feed based on camera input. I found results start to look “good enough” at 150–though high resolution isn’t necessarily desirable because I wanted to preserve a “pixelated” look as a reminder of the constituent pixels. In the future, I’ll spend some time thinking about ways to speed this up to make higher resolution live video feed possible, though low res has its own charm 🙂

Combinations I tried:

Image + Image

Image + Live Video

Image → Video (apply Image colors to Video)

Video frames → Image (map video frame colors to image in succession)

Video + Video

Future Work

Other than what has been detailed in each of the experiment subsections above, I want to generally think about boundaries/edge cases, use cases, inputs/outputs, and the design of the algorithm more to push the meaning generated by this process. For instance, I might consider ways to selectively prioritize certain parts of Image B during reconstruction

 

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)