Category: AprilPlan

I’ve been struggling to come up with interesting projects or endeavors these past few weeks, although I’ve been hoping that I will arrive at some interesting discovery as I experiment with a few things.

One of these things is an Intel RealSense Depth camera (borrowed from the studio), which I’ve been working on ways of moving camera data, live or recorded, to work with Unity. I had a few ideas about ways of algorithmically distorting this depth data, and warping the interaction between the camera’s sense of space and time.

Less related to “capture” is a speed tufting tool that I’ve been learning to use, which I will be rigging to do tufting automatically within 2D coordinates. I’ve had an idea for a while of creating a live interaction between performance or world movement and embroidery or other forms of textile fabrication. I was thinking this would be possible using the depth camera, which does a good job of interpreting 3D activity, and whatever configuration of motors I decide on for the project. This is a concept that I have been considering working into a final project for another course I’m currently taking, algorithmic textiles, which would involve writing path algorithms specifically catering to the automated tufting system.

Aside from these, I have found the offerings so far to be refreshing and stimulating exercises, so I wouldn’t mind continuing with a set of those as I work on some of this stuff.

I will be making several fairly lightweight offerings for the remainder of the semester, unless one of the experiments works well enough to turn into a legitimate final project.

These will include:

• Film my girlfriend cooking with the mini heat camera.
• Experiments with my housemate and another member of our isolation pod who are Tae Kwon Do black belts.
  • • We tried doing photogrammetry with the other five of us taking pictures/ videos while she held a kick, but the results were very messy even after Metashape spent two days processing. I am going to try again ASAP with just me taking photos.
    • She ordered glow-in-the-dark nunchucks so this weekend we’ll try some long-exposure nunchuck painting.
• Try to produce better/more interesting results with the slit-scan program I wrote in p5.js. This may have more to do with my choice of video input than improving the program itself.
• What I really want to do is make something with the digitized VHS tapes from my childhood, but I am stuck on what form it will take.
  • • Photogrammetry didn’t work very well because I couldn’t find a clip where everyone was staying still as the camera moved.
    • I also tried the Topaz video upscaling app because I thought it would interesting to have the algorithm recreate the memories more vividly. Unfortunately, it only made the artifacts worse (which is kind of poetic but didn’t look so great.)
    • Any suggestions are welcome. I feel like this is a valuable source with high emotional valence (at least to me) but I don’t know what to do with it.

Mostly, I just want to make something nice before I graduate 🙁

New Plan:

I think what I need to do is try to get smaller in order to finish my (rapidly-adjusted and deadline-approaching) thesis project.  I will incorporate my work for ExpCap into the final moment of the performance where materials created over a Zoom-based, interactive performance event are amalgamated into a map for the participants to take with them.

The Project:

This project, Packing and Cracking, is work about gerrymandering that I have been creating for the past two years; however, in the past two to three weeks have been redeveloping it for an online performance.

I often describe it as follows:

Do we choose our politicians, or do our politicians choose us?
Packing and Cracking is an interactive mapmaking event (now online!) about gerrymandering: the pervasive practice of politicians choosing their voters rather than the other way around. Through participatory drawing and map-drawing games, Packing and Cracking uses critical cartography, historical accounts of the first gerrymanders, and interviews with people dealing with gerrymandering today to show how easy and disenfranchising gerrymandering can be and ask what, if anything, we should do about it.

The map and my work for ExpCap:

Throughout the experience, a collection of files are created from aggie.io  (a collaborative painting application), screenshots of google map locations, collected group google doc writings, and images of other collaborative Zoom interactions. These are then turned into a map that folks take away with them and hopefully demonstrate the power of small actions of doing something, even if it is only to take 90 minutes to learn about gerrymandering. The image at the top of this post is a map from the second playtest. Essentially, I am collecting, formatting and randomizing images, and then creatively using some contact-sheet automation processes to produces a very high resolution image amalgamation (So folks can zoom in and read all of the materials created) . The link to a high resolution image from a third playtest round is here.

In the in-person version of this project, these images were created on paper and accumulated in the 3D space of the theater into an installation. I feel like the maps I am creating now would like to have a more 3D, or even more navigable effect or experience to their viewing. This is something I have been working on, but would like to use my time to expand on the research now that much of the rest of the experience has been rewritten.

The issues: It needs to be created pretty quickly in real time to be sharable with the audience in the last moment of the performance. Currently, I am just sweating out the image processing during the penultimate (5ish minute) video interview segment. Or, perhaps I make a 2D map and also 3D/ more travesible space to send out later – but ideally it would be included in the final moment of the show. The dataset of what is created along the way is a set of roughly  45-75 PNG files.

Below of are some picture of the last in-person show from a festival in January, so you can get a sense of what the previous accumulation used to look like.

In conclusion:

I have been having a hard time figuring out what I want to work on (re:ExpCAp) and focusing in general with all of this (even more than my usual large amount of) screentime. While I am very excited about this project, I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed about my output right now. I am usually highly motivated, but anxiety about the future (re: graduation) is also quite distracting. I love the home that is the studio, and have been very grateful for the space of this class. I like the offerings and will continue to do them as the small projects remind me to focus and that I do really love making things. Probably gonna cut my rambling off here, as I am already turning this in quite late.

Any advice/thoughts would be much appreciated!

Thanks y’all!

QuaranteavitySketch1 from Philippe de Bree on Vimeo.

For April Plan I want to continue working on the film I have been theorising for the most part of the quarantine so far.

Password: sketch

Above is a sort of sketch for the middle segment of the film in which I will be using the interviews with creative students.

The first segment is going to look at an archival connection between the history of the quarantine, the history of perceived ‘creativity’ and the the shifted dimensions of video games.

The final segment is hopefully going to look at institutional shifts in more established creative practices (museums, galleries, orchestras etc), but to a degree I think I might hold off on this segment until after the semester is over as a still need to conduct interviews with respective parties/get interviews at all.

For the end of the semester I’m thinking of using Detectron2 to create a novel tool for collage.

Right now, my idea is to take a YouTube link of one’s favorite cute animal video and use FFMPEG to pull frames from it, then run Detectron2 to mask those images, and finally mask the images (probably with GPU numpy). Then I hope to translate the images and make them into a collage from those results.

My goal for next week would be to take a segmented YouTube video and mask out the background as a test.

For the remainder of the semester, I’m working on a project about communication between generations.

Since the launch of the Person in Time project, I’ve been thinking about capturing something about my elders – specifically my grandfather. We’ve always lived on opposite sides of the country, and in the last couple years, he’s expressed a sort-of regret over not having been as active a presence in my life (we’ve also gotten quite a bit closer, so that might show some contrast to how things were when I was a kid).

• I think about the things he says like “I regret never getting to know you as well as I wish I could have”
• I notice changes in him and changes in my dad (his son) over time.
• Lately, I’m also wondering whether I will be able to see him again.

• “Objective” – corporate knowledge transfer methods —> would be weird, and maybe awesome to try and repurpose a stiff “corporate knowledge transfer machine” for hyper-personal use. So far, I’ve done quite a bit of reading and I have to say that the results are hilarious. :)
• “Subjective” –
  • ‘knowledge as an heirloom’
  • indigenous knowledge transfer methods

• Mobility: walk cycles, motion capture
• Storytelling, audio interviews
• handwriting
• Facetime – record audio & video from there
• Diary study (via sms?)
• Collaboration over an app (we all download the same one, and capture something about our lives)
• We all capture ourselves doing the same thing (could use a fun app above)
• “Leaving a trail” – Nina Katchadourian’s sorted books

• Generally, video with interview audio overlay
• Family dinner —> do it live over some digital tool, or create a digital one via certain artifacts

I will have more to share about the research – but I want to post this for now! Sorry for the delay.

for my April plan I want to organize all of my photos of Missouri to Denver billboards as a typography type of project.

Within the next week I also want to create another room time lapse but this time restricting my phone to the ceiling fan over the course of a few days. This might be a bit challenging because I will have to go out of my way to restrict myself in a space within a space so it will be an interesting experience.

As I have repeatedly discussed with classmates and Nica, I would like to use the rest of the time in ExCap to explore slit scanning. I have already experimented with the technique, as seen in one of my previous posts. Since I cannot work with Julie, though, I plan to make this into a project about myself and my thoughts during quarantine. I think I will end up with a series of self portraits, via compositions of objects and ideas important to me, and perhaps parts of my body. I will continue to experiment with the limits of the technique and my capture apparatus, and I’ll share the best results.

I do have a few specific goals:

• Hook up my DSLR to my laptop so I can run a Processing script with a higher resolution webcam
• Automate my rotation mechanism with Arduino stuff
• Try out this After Effects technique
• Attempt to do slit-scanned photogrammetry

The main project I plan to work on for the rest of the semester is a video portrait of passing chaotic time in my current apartment.

It will be an extension of the person-in-time assignment. My initial idea was to create a portrait of my friend through capturing her apartment. In the last two weeks, I have realized however how much me and my things are engrossed in this space. It begins to seem difficult to pick out what’s mine and what’s hers. So instead I decided to accept the hybridity of this apartment right now and capture it all together. I guess the goal now is not to portray an individual, but a transient space and chaotic time, a temporary home for people who are about to graduate from this town in a few weeks.

I have been playing around with green screening — me doing various mundane things in a green suit, passing time. I want to interpose videos of different time scale on top of each other to create a sense of disorientation.

To try to stay disciplined, I set three deliverable deadlines: Thu 4/16, Tue 4/21, Tue 4/27.

On the side, I also want to do some small green screening experiments, perhaps something with puppetry, collages, and stop-motion animation. I have been really into Terry Gilliam animations, so I might want to play around with creating small animations with interesting objects I found in the apartment.