Category: Projects

f(orb)idden orb

A completely self-centered world emerges from a mirrored sphere. You cannot escape the center of the orb.

 

Cognitive neuroscience researchers studying spatial cognition have identified two frames of reference that humans use to understand space: allocentric (world-based) and egocentric (self-based.) These drawings depict the ultimate egocentric frame of reference: a spherified world emanating from the viewer at its center.

I used the NeoLucida portable camera lucida to project the contents of a mirrored sphere onto paper. I traced the projection in pencil to capture the rough location and distortion of objects in the world. Then, I inked in the sketch freehand, filling in details as I had seen them in the camera lucida and the photographs I took through it.

Objects perpendicular to my gaze (i.e. to the side of the orb) became stretched beyond recognition. Even small things, like the bottle in the third image, were spaghettified, as if the image were an inverse black hole. Some objects, no matter how hard I looked, were simply unidentifiable. Dents and other imperfections of the orb distorted the image, creating miniature whorls and spirals throughout the scene.

Preliminary sketch of the orb as it sat placidly in a floral porcelain bowl.

I wanted to see how different environments would appear in the orb, and how it would distort the human form into something unnerving yet familiar. Golan pointed out the unintuitive (at least to me) fact that one’s vantage point (eye or camera lucida) will always be located at the exact center of the sphere. This is oppressive, but unfortunately cannot be stopped.

Pathological mental states like anxiety separate the brain user from their environment, creating a whirlpool of self-centered obsessions and paranoias. Sometimes, one’s own brain is the only thing that doesn’t feel distorted and unfamiliar, when in fact it is more beneficial for the self to open up and bleed into the environment. The second image shows how sheer force of will allowed me to escape the reverse singularity of the orb. Unfortunately, my facial features did not stay intact and it was somewhat painful.

Measurements used to draw a circle 9″ in diameter. Also note that the camera lucida should be level with the equator of the orb in both dimensions. Lights can be used to equalize illumination; in this picture I have several lights pointed at the ceiling.

If I were to do this project again, I’d have a more methodical setup from the start. I’d also develop a more portable/generalizable and less opportunistic rig, although clipping the camera lucida to whatever was available in the environment did help immerse it into the scene. Each drawing was relatively time-consuming, but I would love to make some more.

Shapes of Love

For my typology, I objectified “I love you”.

(I would have separated the models into their own 3D viewers, but Sketchfab only allows one upload per month.)

I created 3D sculptures out of the shape that one’s mouth makes over time as they speak the words “I love you” in their first language.

Background

As I’ve watched myself fully commit to art over the last few months, I’ve realized that my practice—and, really, my purpose as a human—is about connecting people. I love people. I love their feelings and their passions, listening to their stories, working together, and making memories. I love love. I want people to experience the exhilaration, sadness, anger, jealousy, and every single powerful emotion that stems from love and empathy.

Having this realization was quite refreshing, as for the last year and I half I have been debating over various BXA programs, majors, minors, and labels. But no longer–I am proudly a creator, and I want to create for people.

Therefore, this project represents both my introduction to the art world as a confident and driven artist and a symbol of my appreciation for those who have helped me get to this point in my life. The people I love are the reason I live, so I wanted to create something that allowed other people to express that same feeling.

method

My typology machine is quite obnoxious, and the journey I took to figure it out was long.

First, I tested everything on myself.

I recorded myself saying “I love you”.

I originally wanted to do everything with a script based on FaceOSC. I wrote such a script, which took a path to a video file and extracted and saved an image of the shape of the lips and the space inside the lips for every frame.

My fear for this method was true: I felt there were not enough keypoints around the lips to provide distinct enough lip-shape intricacies from person to person. Plus FaceOSC is not perfect, so some of the frames had glitched and produced incorrect lip-shapes. This would not do when it came to stitching everything into a 3D model. From here I decided to do it all manually.

Most of these “I love you” videos broke down into about 40 frames, and if not I used every other frame to trim it down.

I opened every single frame of each video in Illustrator, traced the inside of the mouth with the pen tool, and saved all the shapes as DXF files.

I did this on my own mouth first, but here is Pol’s. At this point I wasn’t sure whether I would be laser cutting or 3D printing for the final product, but I knew laser cutting would be the fastest way to create a prototype, so I compiled all the shapes of my mouth onto one DXF and laser cut them all in cardboard.

I thought the stacking method would be cool, but it was not. I did not like the way this looked. At this point I buckled down and prepared myself for the time required to 3D print.

To do this, I manually stacked all the lip-shapes in Blender and stitched them together to create a model.

With the first two models I made, I printed them at a very small scale (20mm).

I was definitely happier, but they needed to be bigger.

Finally, I printed them at the size they are at now, which took 12 hours. One incredibly frustrating thing I did not document was the fact that the scaffolding accidentally melded to the actual model, so I spent an hour ripping off the plastic with pliers and sanding everything down. And for the finishing touch I spray painted them black, and attached them to little stands.

Cassie (English)

Policarpo (Spanish)

Ilona (Lithuanian)

discussion

One of the most interesting aspects of this project is that it exemplifies the idiosyncrasies of the ways we communicate. As you can see, some people’s mouths are long and some are short; some enunciate a lot while others don’t; some talk symmetrically while others don’t. So not only are the sculptures physical representations of a mental infatuation, love, but they almost become portraits of the people from which they came. This is a look into the tendencies of the owner–the emotions they feel, the lies they tell, the passion with which they speak, the culture from which they come all influence the shape of their mouths. These sculptures tell the unique story about a person and their connection with the recipient of their “I love you”. As a result, no two sculptures can be the same.

Unfortunately, the manual nature of this process, plus waiting for the 3D printing, allowed me to create only 3 sculptures for the deadline. However, I am definitely not finished with this project.

Memorabilia Before Impact: A Collection of Objects the Moment They Hit the Ground

The goal of my project was to develop a machine whose process of capture would a destructive one. I was inspired by quantum physics research, for the moment any data is collective, the object of interest has changed or has been destroyed as a result. I wanted to develop a machine that illustrated this concept in a more tangible processes that was connected to a more human experience. This project takes objects that are marketed to be of sentimental value and captures these objects the moment before they shatter. By filming them using a 960-fps camera and recording the sound I capture the image of the object as whole but allude the sound of its death implying the object is no longer in existence.

I wanted to present my objects as small snapshots of each moment. The objects that I am presenting aim to tell a story of a single individual is has gone through life purchasing these objects dedicated to capturing special moments. The object that were meant to hold a memory now live in a digital shelf where they no longer exist in the physical realm.

The end result of my project still has room to grow. I think an opportunity that I could explore is to have several groups of objects that could be linked to multiple people and their objects. This single set, I believe appears to be a single person of a specific taste, but I would love to have multiple collections that go to tell a variety of memorabilia. Another improvement could be to rather than use a high-speed camera is to take this concept a step further and step up a camera to a pressure plate and link the drop of the object to the camera to only capture a single frame the moment it hits the ground. In this collection method, the machine can only document and remember the object has whole and has no evidence that it was changed or broken in the process.

Typology Machine – Tahirah Lily

This machine was designed to help break tunnel-vision college students out of their mundane daily commute by encouraging them to notice their surroundings and awaken their imagination.

  • What was your research question or hypothesis?

I wanted to know if I traveled on the busiest routes on campus, could I find something in them that would make the journey more lively?

  • What were your inspirations?

I was really inspired by children and how they view at the world through curiosity and wonder. As young adults, I find we’re losing this whimsical way of looking at life, and I wanted to challenge myself and others to bring that back into our day to day.

  • How did you develop your project? Describe your machine or workflow in detail, including diagrams if necessary. 

I began by identifying common activities children did and then looking at common activities on campus to try and find any potential for a project. I eventually decided to walk the busiest routes on campus and pay attention to any defects or irregularities in my surroundings. I then photographed these elements and ran students from various majors and years through my machine, asking them to tell me what they saw in the images.

  • In what ways is your presentation (and the process by which you made it) specific to your subject? Why did you choose those tools/processes for this subject?

I chose to use a Nikon D3300 and an Ipad and Apple Pencil for this project. The Ipad and Pencil allowed me to record the pencil strokes of the student, so I could combine this with the video footage later in editing. I was initially planning on using a Cintiq tablet, but I figured it was more powerful and complicated than the students in my project needed. The Ipad and Pencil are also more familiar to a notebook and crayon used by children, and since that was the spirit I was trying to invoke, I felt that would be more appropriate.

  • Evaluate your project. In what ways did you succeed, or fail? What opportunities remain?

I think the overall idea was successful! The students that went through the machine laughed a lot and mentioned that they wanted to look out for fun irregularities more often.

I also wanted the pen tracking to be synced to the students visual pen strokes in the video, but I realized after the fact that the time-lapse feature I used on the Ipad sped up the capture so when I brought it into Premiere and tried to edit the time back to match it just became a little choppy.

I think technically I could have edited the footage better if I had more knowledge of Premiere Pro and filmography. I still can’t figure out why the video will only export in vertical form. I think maybe it had something to do with my camera settings. I don’t think this is a failure exactly, but a steep learning curve I’m still on the way up from.

 

Typology Machine Project Proposal

For the Typology Project, I plan on creating a system that collects the amount of saliva produced from a black body while performing black music. For the purpose of this project, black music refers to songs created by black artists, rather than black dominated genres. The song selections will range from the years of ~1840 to 2019. The pieces chosen will be songs (negro spirituals, gospels, popular music, etc.) created to uplift spirits during times of oppression. The intention of the project is to combine black DNA with black history and identity.

The capture system will include gauze, a digital scale, and vials. The gauze will act as an artificial tongue and will absorb the saliva created during each performance. If the gauze gets too damp, it will get switched out mid performance. The gauze will be weighed before and after being used; and, the same amount of saliva will go in a vial to “document” the data produced. Alternatively, a pipette and/or container will be on hand to capture excess saliva. This action may be performed 20 or more times.

Project proposal

I’m blowing big bubbles and capturing them with the polarization camera.

Bubbles do interesting things with light because the thickness of the bubble film is the same size as certain wavelengths of visible light (hence the iridescence of bubbles). While bubbles to necessarily do anything to the polarization of the light, because they interfere with the movement of light through them, I might get interesting effects by shining polarized light through them. I’m hoping that, by shining polarized light at the bubbles, I’ll be able to get interesting images with the polarization camera.

^ that’s what bubbles do to light

 

^ and this is what that looks like (these are visible colors, not any polarity magic

I’m going to blow big bubbles in the photo studio in Margaret Morrison, lit with polarized light, and then I’m going to photograph the bubbles with the polarization camera. Hopefully variations in shape and size (because big bubbles can be weird lumpy shapes) will provide some differentiation between the different images.

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).

Typology Proposal: Capture by Breaking

For my typology I wanted to capture fragile object just before breaking. Using the slow-motion camera, I wanted to film dishes being dropped and capture the moment when an object hits the floor but before breaking. The concept of my project is to create a machine whose process for documentation results in the destruction of the object captured.

I have made several tests with the iPhone slow-motion camera, but the results have only been extremely blurry photographs. I have been testing with a bouncy ball, making clean up non-existent, and have found that by looking at the spike in the audio, it allows me to look 1 frame beforehand to see the object (if ignore the blur) sitting on the floor. This allows me to catch the moment in which the object is perfectly intact and almost balancing perfect on the floor.

Also, as an additional thought I was thinking to include with each image a decibel reading of the loudest moment with the dish breaks. I thought it might give the piece an interesting feeling to have all the objects intact perfectly ‘balancing’ on the floor with the sound of its destruction next to it. But at the same time, I feel that it would ruin the schrodinger’s cat idea where the view is in anticipation and in an unknown state is the object is indeed destroyed of if it survived the impact.

Some inspiration:

Billy Violla (slow-motion video artist): https://vimeo.com/64302190

Robert Morris: https://www.wikiart.org/en/robert-morris/box-with-the-sound-of-its-own-making-1961

The Slow-Mo Guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVOb3RzS5t4

 

Typology Machine Proposal: Digital Hygiene and Microverses

For my typology, I’ll be using the Bebird Otoscope Camera to inspect and document the connection ports on people’s devices. Normally used to inspect people’s ears and clean accumulated wax, I’ll be using the camera to inspect the buildup of lint and other detritus in ports on people’s phones, laptops and other connections.

By employing photogrammetery I hope to create an interactive model that can be scaled up and navigated by the viewer and show the unusual landscapes that live with us.

SeanLeo_ExCap_Typology_preview

Currently my work flow will be taking video recordings with the otoscope, then converting the footage into photo jpegs to then create the photogrammetry model out of.

Given the scale of the capture site, I’m trying to devise best practices to record and inspect with the most uniformity, and the best focus.

Typology Machine Project Proposal

A Collection of Liquids Going from Cold to Hot, then (if possible) Hot to Cold.

Sink Test

Shower Test

For my typology project, I am going to capture the the thermal changes of liquids going from hot to cold, and then (if possible) cold to hot. I am interested in capturing not just the liquids, but the surrounding environments that change in response to liquids, too. I feel like I often make art projects that have a specific (political) am in mind from the outset. For this project, I will try a different approach and use the time to try and document a phenomenon I found interesting when playing around and experimenting with this heat camera. The FLIR E30bx Thermal Camera  will be the capture device. All of this capture is clear  and ‘invisible’ without this type of capture. I will let this inquiry drive my projet instead of a more preconceived idea.

Questions I have:

  • Is this remotely interesting?/why do this?
  • How can I narrow or expand the scope of my inquiry?
  • A few technical/aesthetic questions:
    • in my examples above I am using timelapse, how are you responding to that? Is something being missed by the slow change of the sides? I have the original version on my comp and will also show for comparison during our discussion.
    • What about seeing the heat information on the image?
    • The capture is only at 160×120 pixels. I am capturing it by recording the live stream off of my computer; is the above magery to grainy? Should I keep them smaller?
  • How am I going to display my typology project?

Places/things I will film:

  • a variety of sinks
  • a variety of showers
  • ice melting
  • water boiling
  • rivers/streams at sunset/sunrise
  • coffee dispensing from a large shop size dispenser.
  • hosses
  • public and private locations of the above.
  • park faucet
  • eyewash station
  • water fountain
  • What about more gaseous liquid situations, like steam? Or car exhaust? Does this ‘count’?
    • ok and some of these ideas towards the end here are just water dispensers and the change in temperature might be very minute (if at all/visible) should I include these? re: possibly narrowing or expanding my scope from question above.

 

Some related things I found inspiring/interesting/surprising: