Category: Uncategorized

Rough Draft Experiments for Final

Test experiments messing around with Unity controls/effects with photogrammetry objects that relate to interviews with musicians

 

Questions/Problems

  • Using screencastify with NDI to record but pretty choppy even on 60fps
    • Screen record on game bar doesn’t record Unity builds or in engine
  • Thinking about adding a smoothing effect (slow down) 
    • Mess around with effects
  • Thinking about capturing empty venues/places and/or objects relevant to the interview
  • Currently using display.land = would be easier if I could convert video to photos to photogram
    • Should I use ffmpeg (agisoft trial is out, other free softwares for photogram)

Final Project Checkpoint

For the visualizing aspect, I got a simple city layout woking in Three.JS. Based on some prior browsing history parsing, I was able to figure out which websites associated to what objects (skyscrapers, windmills, trees, houses, etc.). The size of the objects are determined based on the frequency each link was visited, and clicking on the object will open the site, so you know which sites were visited frequently.

For the future, I would like to make the city more customizable to a person’s history.. I would also like to spend more time on parsing the browsing history, ultimately reducing it down to a purity parameter. Some examples I have are changing the cloud density, background and land color, light color and strength based on on the purity of the browsing history

End of Semester Plan

My hope, for the last few weeks of the semester is to explore techniques for modeling, viewing, and animating my apartment – my “space of  quarantine.” I’ve appreciated my space as it’s nurtured a curiosity and sometimes excitement during this time of crisis. This project will be executed by using a mix of photogrammetry and 2d animation to create the desired effect. Below are some initial experiments and sketches, that may influence the final outcome of this project. I’m hoping to give myself the space to play and experiment in this project while still constraining myself enough to produce a structured, final composition.

For the images I took a photogrammetric model of my apartment into blender and used the virtual camera to take photographs from far away with extreme depth of feel.

Shot with .1 f stop; around 200 mm zoom.
Rendered with .4 f stop.

 

 

Scan created using Scandy app, on iphone X.

In addition I’ve been exploring techniques for rigging my phone above or around my space. I first experimented with mounting my phone to my fan – see my post on this topic. More recently I’ve made what I refer to as a zip line for my phone. See below.

Objects of My Isolation

The grid didn’t represent how I feel right now. The objects are:

  1. DND dice: I started playing this game with my friends. Normally I’d never have time.
  2. Can of chickpeas: We don’t want to go to the grocery store too often so we got the Costco pack of chickpeas for the intervals between fresh vegetables.
  3. Sweater for a vodka bottle: I found it in my girlfriend’s house. It’s just funny and covered in cat hair.
  4. Airpods: I bought these to wear while I’m walking to school, now I wear them 5+ hours per day which really makes my ears hurt.
  5. Nintendo Switch: the thing to play Animal Crossing on. I wouldn’t have bought one if it weren’t for quarantine.
  6. Lotion: My skin is super dry from staying inside all day.
  7. Origami star: my girlfriend is making a lot of these.
  8. Vermont DoL form: She is also trying to get her unemployment check but they don’t even pick up the phone anymore because thousands of people are calling.
  9. 14 cans and 5 bottles: the beverage consumption of 3 bored people over 24 hours.

End of semester plan

I will be continuing to create anthropomorphic squirrel videos. I have spent the past few weeks shooting, working with Topaz video enhance AI, learning color correction and grading and trying to get DAIN to work. I think the most recent shots have lost the elements of uncanny that some of the earlier shots had and have been leaning too far into constructed sets that teeter into the “cute” category. Going forward I’m focusing on finding the balance between the uncanny, whimsical, and children’s book tone.

Side projects – I have a large amount of footage that my great grandma filmed, mundane and exciting shots from her day to day. Starting off i’m working with the footage with video enhancement to see what that changes, how it affects the image. I do not have a specific goal in mind, but am treating this as a beginning for a project archive of family, place, and time.

One key elements for my projects is getting the DAIN program to function. I have had a lot of difficulty with this, but am continuing to troubleshoot.

End of Semester Plan

I plan to continue working on my Person In Time project, a 360 video performance that simultaneously will show all my movements, actions, and possibly, affections, over a 24h quarantine day. 

The stay-at-home order has enabled the transfer of our outdoor activities and operations into the domestic space. What used to happen outside of our walls, now happens virtually all over our places. Our house is, therefore, the control room for the production, consumption, and biopolitics of our lives (P. Preciado, 2020). This project aims to complete the cycle signifying the surveillance techniques of our bodies by public and private institutions, but now inside of the new country demarcated within our partitions.

My main goal during the rest of the semester will be to speculate with the deformation of time along the spatial axis of my home in different ways:

  • simultaneous actions of different time-periods
  • looped movements
  • timelapse recording of outdoor and indoor lighting settings 
  • interactions between asynchronous actions (with green screen removal)

I will use a fixed 360 camera to record my whole living space at once. Then, I will use a background subtraction algorithm (possibly, this one) to rotoscope myself in various clips and edit a final video piece with all the different fragments. Although the performance will contain unhomely activities and distorted views of the anxious experience of enclosed living, I will avoid choreographing and beautifying the movements to produce a pseudo-surrealistic documentary. 

References:

Readings:

  • NO FUN by Tina Rivers Ryan
  • Sopa de Wuhan: Pensamiento Contemporáneo en Tiempos de Pandemias by Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj ŽiŽek, Jean Luc Nancy, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Santiago López Petit, Judith Butler, Alain Badiou,  David Harvey,  Byung-Chul Han, Raúl Zibechi, María Galindo, Markus Gabrie, Gustavo Yañez González, Patricia Manrique, and Paul B. Preciado.

End of Semester Plan

For the rest of the semester I’ll be working on a system in my living room, using projection, streaming Ip cams and the Kinect. Given the lack of ability to travel and venture out to public places I thought to bring the places to me by creating something akin to the camera obscura effect, difference being rather than a projection of my immediate outside surroundings it can be anywhere in the world. Using the Kinect to track my motions and TouchDesigner, my hope is to use my body as a way to navigate space and create portals to other streaming locations from the trails of my own local movement.

April Plan

I’m going to try to keep up with the offerings when I can through the rest of the semester. In addition, I’m working on a final project for this course. While I’m still trying to figure out the details of exactly what I’m going to do, I’m going to be using a fax machine as my medium. Because I have one at my house, I want to experiment with the fax machine as a tool for sending visual information to someone far away, but also as a way to collaboratively create art. The project is likely going to consist of me faxing something to people daily, expecting a response from them (which consists of the original fax being altered and faxed back) within 24 hours.