Policarpo – Page 2 – 60-461/761: Experimental Capture

Metrics of a hug

In the 50s and 60s, psychological research was lead by behaviorists and psychoanalysts that supported the idea that we, as humans, became attached to our mothers because they provide us with food. Harry Harlow’s studies with monkeys -now unethical- revealed that our healthy development compromised more than nourishment and personal livelihood. Love was part of this equation. As we grow, we extend the boundaries of our affection to other individuals – sometimes even to non-human objects.

In highly-intertwined technological times, sometimes, this affection is shown as data messages, photos, phone calls, or 1-day-delivery Amazon packages. In this scenario, our caress has to travel through a devious matrix of data filters until it reaches the final recipient. But still today, we have not lost many other physical shows of affection: the hug. Almost universal to all our cultures, hugging is one of the most sophisticated ways of communication. Polite, intimate, or comforting; passionate, light, or quick; one-sided, from the back, or while dancing. Hugs have been widely explored compositionally from the perspective of an external viewer, or from the personal description of the subjects that intervene in its performance.

Statement of purpose
In contrast, I want to study them with a phenomenological attitude and, as James J. Gibson states, from ‘where the action is,’ the outer layer of the physical matter, its surface. For that, I will measure the same surface that intervenes in this affection interchange. Not only is a hug a pressure interaction, but it is also a heat transfer that leaves a hot remnant on the surface once hugged. Using a thermal camera, I will be able to see the radiant heat from the contact surface that shaped the hug. This thermogram will be after projected in real-time onto the ‘anthropomorphic huggable device’ for the study volunteer to view. Parallelly, the temperature information will also be collected to reconstruct 3d models of the hugs using photogrammetry in a virtual archive.

Logistics
The installation will consist of an ‘anthropomorphic huggable device’ placed on top of a manual turntable that will be dressed with a high thermal effusivity material, like polyester. A higher thermal effusivity allows materials to be thermally activated in a more rapid manner – and therefore, a more thermal load can be stored during a dynamic thermal process. This way, the heat footprint will be more intense and will be perceived in a higher contrast with the rest of the surface, allowing a better thermal capture.

Opposed to the huggable device, a thermal camera (Axis Q19-E), and a small projector will capture the heat and project back the image onto the real surface. Both will be connected to a software framework that will apply a bandpass luminance filter to the image to isolate the hugged area from the rest of the image.
Simultaneously, I will use an external DSLR camera calibrated with the thermal camera to record a set of images used to rebuild the hug in 3D through photogrammetry. Finally, the thermal images will substitute the 3d models’ real textures. A 3d interface will collect all models as a virtual archive of the typology.

References
This project is inspired in the work of artists like Linda Alterwitz that explored thermal portrait photography in ‘Signatures of Heat’ (2012-2017). It also aims to be contextually placed around the ‘Body Art’ artwork explored by cuban-american artist Ana Mendieta in ‘Body Tracks’ (1982).

Policarpo Baquera’s ‘Postphotography?’

While reading Joanna Zylinska’s text on ‘post-photography’ I kept thinking about how cameras have always been systems that combine natural intelligence with human agency to capture some features of our reality. Aerial LIDAR systems, apart from capturing very accurate models of our environment, have shown to be useful for seeing long-time patterns on the earth’s surface and lead further understanding of past civilizations. These systems rely sincerely on our direction to work, but I agree that they cannot be categorized as cameras but capturing frameworks.

In this effort of recording the nonhuman, the University of Vienna used acoustic cameras to measure elephant vocalizations in Nepal. Acoustic cameras use a geometrical array of microphones strategically oriented to construct a 2-dimensional representation of loud areas in the chosen direction. Aside from location information, the camera was also able to visualize precisely sounds in low frequencies in the presence of ambient noise. The research showed that the sounds are produced in their mouth rather than at the end of their horns, which helped them understand better how they communicate. The difficulty of classifying this system as either sonic or visual encourages the institution of a post-photographic discipline in charge to record complex phenomena of our environment that no longer belong to the threshold of our senses.

Policarpo Baquera’s ‘Photography and Observation’

Historically, art practice has been consistently mastering the tools and defying the mediums to achieve a new objective and subjective perception of the physical world. Capturing techniques, from writing, painting, sculpting, or photographing, force the author to work along with the limitations of the medium, but art insistently refuses to admit these rules.

John Gribbin, in his text ‘Photography and Observation,’ exposes how in post-photographic times, science decided to rely on the supposed objectivity of photography to observe and measure natural phenomena and living creatures. Even more, different techniques such as microscopy, astronomical observation, or spectrometry, promised ‘to see plainly where the human eye would find nothing but darkness.’ This leads science to trust blindly in cameras to their research work. Nevertheless, far for being utterly reliable, photography has been evolving much from the nineteenth century: dry plates, daguerrotypes, x-ray imaging, or digital sensors. However, while photography matches better our vision every day, disciplines such as medicine still depend on diagrams and drawings to explain time-depending processes.

So while I think that contemporary capture techniques can be highly reliable and precise for measuring purposes in engineering, architecture, and sciences, before choosing them as documenting tools, we should study their suitability over other ‘less objective’ techniques.

In my personal, professional experience as an architect, any digital capturing (cameras, phones) or displaying devices (screens), will not ever substitute a physical representation of a devised design. All of us are equipped with high-quality cameras in our phones, but even like that, texture and color are still not captured with the same accuracy and also error of our eyes. Digital image processing software is designed mainly to please our senses, not always to describe the reality naturally. Consequently, I could not affirm that the medium is objective unless we talked about high-fidelity instruments, where their cost will lead to discussions as to whether objectivity is only affordable to the scientific or professional community.

SEM Photography Session (brie cheese)

I am a cheese obsessed, so for the SEM photography assignment, I decided to look closer to the secret life of a piece of brie cheese.

Brie is an off-white, soft-ripened cheese, usually made from cow’s milk that has a bloomy rind of white mold or ‘penicillium candidum,’ a fungus used in its fabrication along with a mesophilic lactic acid culture. Since brie is a very creamy cheese, I was pretty worried about the dryness of the sample before my appointment with Donna. Besides this, the brie cheese that comes to the US, though produced in France, is a stabilized version that has been aged at least 60 days and may not contain such a varied culture. Luckily, we discovered a slumberous community of life forms under the golden surface.

The close-up images show the branches of the fungus rising over a forest of spores. They are responsible for breaking down the fats and proteins of the dairy, causing the runny texture of the brie over time.

After photographing my sample, I had the privilege of analyzing the spider web sample that Donna found stuck to duct tape in her laboratory. I could not finish this post without sharing the treasures that we found there.

A spore tangled in the filaments of the web.

Microscopical structure of a moth’s scale

Photogrammetry Test

Policarpo Baquera’s “The Camera, Transformed by Machine Vision”

The implementation of machine learning to capturing processes has opened a new field of self-driven cameras able to shot, edit, and compose photographs without our assistance. Although it can seem new, we, as ‘users’ either in photography or any other skillful task, have been bestowing autonomy to all of our tools and devices since the industrial revolution. That first concession is the ‘auto’ mode of our cameras that analyzes the exposure of the image to define specific camera settings. Cameras have become more intelligent over the years to produce more realistic, contrasted, and saturated images able to mimic our vision. Still, in that scenario, the willingness to shot and decide what is kept inside or outside the frame is ours, and that is why photography as a career still exists. In all this kind of photos, the authorship of the revealed product lies in the user. But as cameras evolved as autonomous devices, the responsibility for the style and content of the photo, and eventually, even the authorship could be transferred to the creator of the software and hardware of the camera. Perhaps, the future photographers would be curators of contextual frames and style books used eventually to generate countless exhibitions with pictures taken by communities of users equipped with intelligent cameras.