Category: PersonInTime

Person in Time Project Proposal

Grillboard

A billboard on your teeth.

The Grillboard will be a set of customizable grillz that allow the wearer to interchange the caps of each tooth to create various statements and phrases. Using dental photogrammetry, a 3D model will be made of the mouth and will be used for the base grill. This grill will be all black. From that grill model, white caps will be made to be inserted over the black grill. On the facade of the caps will be a cut out letter; for each exposed tooth (~16) there will be 26 (A-Z) available letters to interchange.

Alternatively or in addition, multiple grillz will be made to create a scrolling text stop motion animation.

https://www.dazeddigital.com/beauty/head/article/42357/1/grills-maker-juanita-grillz

https://www.dazeddigital.com/beauty/head/article/44524/1/pinstripe-grillz-grill-maker-choice-new-wave-rappers

https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/22186/1/wear-rap-lyrics-on-your-teeth-with-these-3d-printed-grillz

https://www.wesa.fm/post/there-are-black-people-future-resident-artists-present-their-projects#stream/0

 

Slime Language

A speaking system using a cross of the English alphabet, sign language, a Ouija board, tattoos, and gang signs.

Slime Language is a system that uses the phalanx sections of the fingers (proximal, middle, and distal) to plot the English alphabet on the hand. By pivoting and pointing with the thumb, words and sentences can be formed to create silent and performative communication between individuals. The placement of the letters is determined by its frequency in the language and accessibility on the hand.

https://www.rypeapp.com/most-common-english-words/

https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/letterfrequencies.html

https://www.britannica.com/topic/code-switching

 

Person in Time Ideas

  1. People saying their names in incredibly slow motion. I think it might be interesting (but it could also turn out to be incredibly un-engaging and boring) to turn people’s stating of their names into incredibly slow, droning sound landscapes. I would be playing with the pitch of the audio to get something that isn’t just deep, obviously slowed down human voices.
  2. Orgasms are weird and they’re different for everybody. I want to record people’s orgasms using a bunch of biometric sensors (a number of muscle sensors in key locations, heart rate sensor, breath sensor, etc) and visualize that data to see how people orgasm differently. A few important notes about this idea: no audio or video is being recorded, I’m not intending to be present in the room while the data is being recorded; my intention with this idea is not to make pornography, but rather to see what different people’s bodies do while they’re having orgasms.
  3. Create a cockroach map of CMU. Track a number of cockroaches (honestly I have no idea how to do this part in any efficient way), and create a map of where the cockroaches like to hang out.

 

3 Draft Ideas for Person In Time

Most of these ideas aren’t flushed out very well, but I like the idea of the final media object being a music video (inspired by Kraftwerk and Nick Cave works)

  1. (I don’t know if this is possible?) Using photogrammetry to capture unique items that I made or crafted together, maybe like a vodo doll. Then use motion capture to capture movement of a persons body either dancing or doing regular tasks and use that to control the motion of the object captured using photogrammetry.
  2. (I don’t know if this is possible?) Have a person dance and track their motions in a green screen space that is not just two dimensional. Create a virtual 3D space either using unity or photogrammetry etc. Use the dancers movements to control the space they are dancing in.
  3. Have a music video plot be people going through their daily lives but access this crazy world through a portal. When they enter this world they become the other people by switching certain things (like the way someone walks get mapped onto someone else or someone’s heartrate/breathing pattern gets mapped onto someone else)

People in Time: Ideas

CFA hallway in the Wean Physics department:

I want to set up a bunch of kinetics or motion detectors in the CFA art hallway and track the movement of people as well as set up some microphones and capture ambient sounds. In real time I want to sent this information to an array of LED lights in the Wean physics hallway and have the lights correspond to movement in CFA as well as the captured distorted sounds. By doings this I am creating a ghostly image of people in one location into another.

Blood pressure monitor:

I want to monitor the blood pressure of a CMU freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior and create different vests that correspond to the their blood pressure. If their blood pressure rises I want the vest to tighten around the individual and play high tempo music. If their blood pressure decreases the vest loosens and the music changes to something more relaxing and soothing.

Climbers, one finger holds:

For this one I have no idea what I want to do with it but I just think that is crazy that people can do this.

 

Person In Time Project Ideas

I’m pretty excited about this project and sort of in awe of the possibilities; I haven’t really gathered my thoughts enough to have fully fleshed-out ideas, but some areas of interest that have stuck with me:

Elder Wisdom/Intergenerational Communication

  • Marcell Esterhazy’s timelapse of his grandfather eating a bowl of soup has seriously stuck with me since we watched it in January. It’s so captivating to me.
  • My family is originally from Pittsburgh (despite this year being my first time living here) – my family roots are all over the city, my parents met here, grandparents and great grandparents lived a few blocks from where I live now, etc. Not very many people are left…(though they are all buried in the same Jewish cemetery in Millvale). But this is a special place for me to be living right now. This project might be an opportunity to capture that somehow…though I’m not sure what that would look like.
  • I’ve been thinking a lot about intergenerational communication lately, passing down knowledge, etc. How might I capture elder wisdom in a novel way? This was somewhat inspired by a previous classmate who captured elder wisdom through a series of interviews. With the tools in this class, I could definitely go beyond audio.
  • To build upon Marey’s motion capture suit of the “average male gait,” (see photo below) I am interested in capturing the gait of other bodies – seniors, children, etc. through chronophotography or stroboscopy.
Marey’s chronophotography in the original motion capture suit

 

The Digital Grotesque

I’m also very interested in this concept of the digital grotesque, and am really drawn to artists using motion capture to distort the human form. Cool 3D World projects, copy/pasting parts of the human body (like adding an arm to a knee), the walk cycle projects, and animations of bodies sort of “melting” or being pulled through holes in the floor…all of these are super intriguing to me.

I don’t have a specific idea yet for this one, but I would love to learn how to work with motion capture and particles and distortions in general. (I remember Nica saying something about knowing how to do this…we should talk :))

People in Time Project Ideas

Here’s a few ideas I’m mulling over for the project. For this project I’m really interested in exploring the unique dynamics and kinematics of human body. Though there are some interesting ideas listed below, I don’t feel that my final framing is contained within.

  1. Walking to a Beat*: A video processing algorithm that generates skeletons for walking people, measures the frequency of the gait and picks a song where the beat matches that frequency. Songs would be presorted by tempo.
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ron-Ikenfc : films often put music over someone walking or doing some other mundane task to give it this sense of being intense, important, or intentional — this scene from spider man shows what happens when that audio is removed. What would happen if we created a system where that audio was added back in?
    2. https://github.com/aubio/aubio
  2. Movie Path*: An algorithm that processes scenes from movies and uses photogrammetry combined with skeleton tracking to figure out exactly the orientation and path of a camera relative to someone in scene. Use that information to generate a path for the robot arm and film someone to add into the original scene.
    1. Which films?
    2. How contemporary would the films be? — There would definitely be a bias towards contemporary film.
    3. Scale? Films use giant booms to hold and guide cameras – would UR5 robot arm be able to achieve  the necessary motion for this project?
      1. Maybe we could put a squirrel into the scenes?
    4. Similar Idea: Use the algorithm to look at individual movie scenes and encode camera position relative to the floor and the focal plane — sort all scenes this way. Make this searchable by camera position. Use this to find movie scenes that could accept characters from other videos — put squirrels into films? 
  3. On Body Camera Rigs: There are a lot of camera rigs that stabilize the jitter and motion that is inherent in handheld filming, could I create a system that does the opposite? — That moves and responds to human input. The goal here would not be to create a jittery noisy video, rather to create a system that dances and moves and rotates in response to some human input
    1. maybe slow motion camera would be good?
    2. Could a gimbal system be repurposed to do this?
    3. https://www.videomaker.com/buyers-guide/camera-rig-buyers-guide
    4. https://www.adorama.com/cdagcjib.html?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIkfjP2_WB6AIVlozICh36ZgzDEAQYAiABEgJjV_D_BwE&utm_source=adl-gbase
  4. Long Exposure People Pixel Averaging: capture the trails of people by making an algorithm that averages pixels over time with wait the pixels where people have been (a pixel has both position in grid and position in time)
  5. People responsive systems*: set up a set of highly responsive systems, that will rotate in the slightest amount of air in a populated place set up a video camera to capture the rotations and frame the entire scene through these responsive systems
    1. Also: put responsive things into the air that people could move like smoke or micro bubbles or dust
  6. Dust cam: Create a camera set up in front of a light source at just the right angle so that it will pick up the microscopic dust particles in the air
    1. As people walk past the dust particles would get disturbed in a distinct way.
  7. Novels shots:
    1. Building cut away like the hallway scene in oldboy
      1. Creating a very flat side scroller  way of interacting with this
      2. Could an algorithm take like 3 wide angle shots and stitch together a super flat image?
      3. http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~ron/PAPERS/ieee_mds1.pdf
      4. https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/34264/how-to-remap-a-fisheye-image
      5. https://docs.opencv.org/2.4/modules/imgproc/doc/geometric_transformations.html?highlight=remap
      6. Maybe video photogrammetry (where a set of frames for photogrammetric model is generated at each point in time)
    2. Other shots that might make people look a little funky/be fun:
      1. Fisheye lens
      2. Parallelized imagery with hyperbolic mirrors(see bellow)
      3. schlieren optics
        1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieren_photography
        2. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3267/9a2ab1d35774a4b859323e5d7548efb45660.pdf
    3. Side Scrolling Everywhere*: (Connected to above — Novel shots idea):
      1. Use a series of cameras and a flattening/warping algorithm to create super flat scene that looks like a side scroller game

Hallway scene from oldboy

 

PersonInTime – Ideas

3 Ideas I had for the project:

  • Similar to the Phodography work we saw in class, hook up a camera around a person’s neck and have it take a picture every time their heartbeat goes up. The photos then can be grouped together based on the heartbeat of the person to show what settings/scenes lead to a raised heartbeat, or a calmer one.
  • Capture the heart rate of a person over time, as well as their geo location. Use the data and save it to google maps to identify what the most stressful locations are to a person. Potentially create a database of results for people to see where the general stressful locations are.
  • Capture the conversations of a person to find the frequency of how much they talk during the day. Potentially combine with gps to find where the person talks.

Person in Time Project Ideas

These all feel only tangentially related to the prompt, but I also think they all sound like a lot of fun, so…

  1. Exquisite Choreo – You know the game where someone draws a picture, then someone else describes the picture, then a third person draws a picture based just on the description, then someone else describes that, and so on? It’s like that but with dance. I would do a few rounds: someone dances to a clip of music and I record them, then someone else watches that video and tries to write a description for the movement. I show that description to another dancer, et cetera. Alternatively, I just do a series of video with the instruction “Copy this Movement,” like telephone. Alternatively, I just do Exquisite Corpse but with dance, asking “What should come next?” with limited context.
  2. Maybe more of a typology, but… there is this awful door into my residence hall that abruptly stops after you pull it a few inches open. I have enjoyed watching people’s disappointed faces when trying to open this door, especially when I can tell this has happened to them before. I’d love to photograph/film a series of reactions to this. Maybe I could even rig something to do that automatically?
  3. Study for Fifteen Points but YOU are the points – I am currently obsessed with Study for Fifteen Points and I thought it could be fun to recreate it with people instead of robot arms. There are a few ways to do this: firstly, I could give each person a stick with a light at the end, teach them how they should move it, and have them “perform” this somewhere. The “person” they depict could be larger than life, outdoors in the evening somewhere on campus. Could be fun. Alternatively, I could make this something of a game for fewer people, where they are each controlling an interesting point or two and trying to make something that a computer will recognize as a walking. This would force people to consider how their joints move.