Category: PersonInTime

[Draft – two main ideas]

1. Isolating interactions with specific objects, and maybe the manipulation of things like keys or peeling an orange, and digitally removing the objects from the final capture. I’m specifically interested in eating, moving objects from the world to a specific point on your body and focusing intensely on the minute motions of how our hands and bodies manipulate our environment.
2. I was also thinking  about expressing the effects of relativity and the delay of perception due to the finite speed of light, and scaling it down to alter how we perceive bodies in motion. This idea doesn’t apply as directly to a specific human motion as of now, but I may work on incorporating a specific connection.

I’d like to make an app or piece of software that tracks you when you touch your face. It is out of a desire to train myself to not touch my face in light of the upcoming corona virus plague that is (speculatively) coming. I would wear a handless chest mount for my phone, and potentially take a photo and play a sound every time the hands touch the face. These would ideally be compiled to a video of all such instances in real time.

I am thinking of using Unity to make a face-tracking app with ARKit among other tools – technical suggestions appreciated!

ordering one of these:

1. Use photogrammetry on home videos from the early 2000s to reconstruct the actions of a deceased family member, whose memory is fading from my mind.
2. Do some sort of data visualization (tSNE/UMAP, a GAN, a searchable archive?) on 20K+ images downloaded from the Tumblr I used consistently from ages 13-19.
3. Do something with my girlfriend’s cooking skills. Maybe I could film her through the heat camera while she sautés some crazy thing, or film the fermentation of kimchi for a timelapse…

1.) Body as Loop

I’ve been working on a zoetrope with 3d printed lithophanes (3d prints thin enough to shine a light through so that you can see an image) for my Sculpture After The Internet Class and I would like to expand it for this second project. The way the motor is set up I believe I can attach a centre point so that I could have multiple of these zoetropes running off the same motor, ie have lots of loops in sync. With this in mind, I’m pretty interested in the idea of the body as loop (the current iteration has me jumping as it’s framework) and so I would like to have multiple zoetropes with multiple body loops (walk cycle, swinging arms, jumping, rolling on the floor etc) running at the same time.

2.) Love in the Motion Capture Century

Largely inspired by Ayako Kanda and Mayuka Hayashi’s x-ray portraits, I would like to create a series of either animations or still portraits using couples in the motion capture studio. I am particularly interested in how the system is going to figure out the space/blocked sensors between people and whether or not they’ll turn in a symbolic digital blobs under these conditions. [I also want to expand these into large scale/human scaled silk screen prints given the time] // [Could also try to incorporate parallel DepthKit recordings and map the motion tracking to them? Not sure how to technically do this]

3.) Disney’s brain is in a jar

Using photogrammetry (and indeed it’s capability and need for surface) I want to create a series of prints that will essentially make a pseudo 3d model of a human head. This would be silkscreens on a series of plastic sheets to build up a 3d form through looking through them. I am particularly interested in how it is going to negotiate the space inside the form, and indeed dialogue over capturing the inside of bodies through technologies meant for the surface of things.

1. Show someone a film, record where they look, and record what they remember from it at different intervals (1 day, 3 days, 1 week…). Combine the video/tracking info and audio recordings. How does what they looked at influence what and how long they remember?
2. Capture the experiential qualities such as the brightness and loudness of the environments that someone is a part of over the course of a day. What are the difference and  similarities in people’s preferences and the qualities of places they like to (or must) inhabit?
3. Have people do a think-aloud protocol on nothing. Think-aloud is usually a way of getting people to describe their thought process when engaging with a specific task or system. What happens when there’s no task? How might people describe their stream of consciousness?

1) Use Slit-scanning to document a person as their body moves through frames at different rates of time, to create a depiction of a person as hyper-dimensional

2) Use the kinect to alter a person’s shadow form and/or image to document, capture, play with where the person existed in space just moments before.

3) 3d model of a person that will be compressed over a duration until the model fully degrades

1) Micro-expressions in televised public confessions and apologies

Televised confessions or apologies is a very common phenomenon in authoritarian states, where public figures whose have said or done things that deviate away from the state’s mainstream ideologies are forced to apologize on TV or issue a statement for the internet. Activists from China and abroad have been asked to do this. A government official of Hong Kong and corporate leaders as well. This is the state’s way to publicly assert their version of right and wrong.

I have always been interested in the imagery of public apologies—their extreme awkwardness, and the outer and inner transformations that might be occurring through this performative act.

2) A much slower pace of life

Last spring, I went to a Japanese restaurant. I was alone so I sat at the bar, and a sushi chef was working right in front  of me. It was late so he was preparing some rolls for the next day. I watched him for two hours. He would lay down seaweed on twelve mats, and put rice on them, then the fillings and toppings, and then roll each of them. And then twelve more. Perhaps tomorrow night he would do the same thing. There is a meditative quality to it. This sushi chef’s movements make me realize that some people in this world have such routines and repetitions in their lives and are content with that, whereas I feel this urge to make every day unique and different. In this project, I might try to get to know someone whose pace is life is drastically different from mine. I am also reading The Stranger by Albert Camus. The repetitiveness and banality of the life of the main character brings out a type of existential dread. I wonder if a similar type of existential dread would come out of my capture of a differently paced life.

• accelerometer on my body. self-discipline to go slower (?)

3) Imprisoned activists

On Tuesday, student activist 岳昕 who was a leading figure in China’s #metoo movement and labor rights movement was released from the state and came home after more a year of disappearance.

On Thursday, I went to Lebanese Jalal Toufic’s lecture. He mentioned a something that a historian wrote in his notebook. An activist was imprisoned at age 40 to age 50, now he is 65, but deducting the 10 years in prison, he really is 55 years old.

Thinking about the time that an activist spends in prison, I don’t know if I think of this time as ‘lost’ time. Time in prison in itself is a political act, a dedication to a cause. This time of absence from the public eye is in some way dedicated to the public, and it is also often the time where the public becomes catalyzed, turning time ‘lost’ to one individual into time of action and togetherness for the rest.

I want to explore change in the public over the duration of an activist’s imprisonment.

Making “poop-kin.” Inspired by Donna Haraway’s “Making Kin in the Chthulucene,” this project aims to observe the conversation between myself and my microbiome, a non-human set of organisms considered by researchers to be the human body’s 12th organ. The conversation is evidenced by what I eat and what I defecate.

Over several days, I’d collect as much information about “inputs” and “outputs,” visualizing those captures over time.

A day of fluids. We are goopy, mushy, watery meat bags-yet, these movements are invisible within our own body, or abstracted away by modern conveniences. We are rarely confronted with what fluids actually flow through us. What are the cycles of fluid/goo happening in our body? In the span of one 24 hour period, I will collect time/volume/imagery of as many fluids as possible. This information can be used to create a “fluid humunculus,” an abstracted visual of the cyclical fluid processes happening within and without us every single day.

Luckily, I already have data from a previous data visualization project at the NIH that shows how much liquid blood my heart pumps over the course of a heartbeat, which I can incorporate.

Eyeballs. What patterns are there in the eyes over the course of the day? Using video processing methods/machine learning, can I reveal the ebbs and flows of the eyes in one day? Will blood vessels/flow grow and shrink? Am I’m glazed over for the whole day or actively looking?