Category: Uncategorized

Final Project Proposal (April Plan)

My April plan is to make a final project that attempts to visualize someone’s browsing history as a city. It is difficult to say how far I’ll get in this (especially considering all my other courses ramped up in difficulty, so I haven’t been able to think much of this course in the past two weeks). At the very least from my talk with Golan, I would like to spend a substantial amount of time parsing and finding meaning representations of a person’s browsing history. More than half of this project is figuring out what the data means, what the trends and frequencies are, and overall what this says about the person. I’d like to focus my efforts on trying to (from a high level) classify and describe a person’s browsing history using as few descriptors as possible. From there I can work out the visuals such as how I want to display elements of the city (such as buildings, trees, roads, etc.), but even if I do not get to this stage it is alright. I want to spend more time in the planning aspect and carefully understanding and analyzing the data I’m working with rather than jumping to the visual sides of things.

Some attempts I may try at data analysis:

  • Keep a dictionary of good/bad sites, and check each url to see if it is in the dictionary.
  • See trends of the data. Is a site being visited day after day, or just once?
  • Extract the HTML from the page and use NLP to classify a url if it is unknown

9 objects — offering

9 objects:

1) Post it’s — I keep on trying to use post it’s to organize my thoughts and notes

2) Coffee stuff — I’ve made my own coffee every morning

3) Honey — this was full two weeks ago. I’m using it in tea.

4) Tea — I often make afternoon tea

5) Ginger Hand Moisturizer— an old gift from my mom that is now a necessity after I wash my hands

6) Dish soap — I wash my hand with this

7) Desk Lamp — I’ve been sitting and needing light for my desk more often

8) Small pot — I boil water in this for tea and coffee

9) Monitor — I spend most of my day in front of this screen

End of the Year Plan – Olivia

For the rest of the year I’m planning on working on a final project. For this final project I have two ideas I’m deciding between.

  1. I am planning on conducting interviews with bands (specifically those who had cancelled tours or just released albums) and broadcast these interviews both on the radio and online. For this class, I am thinking about creating a visual accompaniment to the interview possibly using photogrammetry or some other moving music-video-esc visual to be played while listening to the interview.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Since the first project is contingent on whether or not I get interviews with these people, I have a second idea for a project
  2. I am planning on creating a slenderman-esc horror video game where I use photogrammetry to capture locations near me that are eerily empty (high school parking lot, train parking lot/outside station, church parking lot, downtown shopping area streets/parking lot). The player of the game walks and explores these locations and has to avoid other people.

Photogrammetric map of my apt.

Prompt:
Make a field guide to your apartment.
Miranda July includes the prompt “make a field guide to your apartment” — I don’t have a yard to I made a field guide and map of my apartment. (See the link below for the actual guide)

 


See full model here

I used the display land app to capture and build a photogrammetric map of my apt. I’m interested in trying to do compositing  with photogrammetry and other capture methods — I’m excited to this model to aid that project.

Fan-tastic Fan Cam & Fan Slit Scans

I’ve been interested in using my ceiling fan as a motion guide for my phone camera. I started by mounting my phone to the blades of the fan and capturing a slow motion video.

I’ve started to play with building rigs off of the fan:

In addition to the simple rigging systems I explored using the fan for slit scanning, with some intriguing results. To the see the original, non-compressed versions of these, click here.

 

Some photos of the slit scan set up:

Photogrammetry Workshop

I realized I forgot to post my work from the photogrammetry workshop with Claire Hentschker a few months ago.

Weirdly enough, I’ve tried photogrammetry-ing myself a couple times since but the results have never been this good. I think setting the quality to medium is actually best.

Bedroom Timelapse

Looking at the timelapse examples and it got me thinking about the messes in my bedroom. Certain messes, like dirty laundry, accumulate for a couple days and then disappear when I do laundry. Other messes, like the stuff on my desk, just accumulate. There are still other messes that don’t change at all. Taking a panorama (or other form of 360 degree or wide angle photo) of my room everyday might reveal how these piles of things change over time.

Person In Time – Draft Ideas

  1. My first idea is to use a thermal camera in an air-conditioned room to capture a dancer (myself) from resting and peaceful, to a frantic and panicked state. The idea is that I would be able to communicate to the viewer the mental state of the dancer both with the choreography becoming more tumultuous and the thermal camera illustrating how the high energy thrashing movements cause the body to become warmer over time.
  2. My next idea is using a slow-motion camera to illustrate the movement between common stages of rest, or between poses. Clearly, this has been done in many ways before, but I’d be interested to see how I could add to the idea by introducing the college setting. I.e, what happens when you put dynamic movement in between everyday activities like students walking to class, getting coffee, etc. Maybe this could be done by tracing with light as well, I can’t recall what that particular technique is called.
  3. Thirdly, and this is my most ambitious idea given the time frame, would be a costume that is reactive to the wearer’s movent when repeated over time. Maybe a skirt with an Arduino and accelerometer so it would respond to repeated movement? I.e jumping, walking, spinning.

Person in Time – Julie’s Closet

I have an incredible friend in the costume design program, Julie Scharf, and she is an artwork in herself. She is incredibly dedicated to her vintage clothing collection, the history and practice of performance costume, and queer imagery in the entertainment industry–and since seventh grade, she has not worn the same outfit twice.

Her, as a stylist, and I, as a photographer, and both of us as queer artists, have partnered on an indefinitely-long project of creating a critical photographic anthology of queer costume. This is not nearly a detailed enough description of it, but the idea is still in development and we don’t want to reveal too much about it yet.

However, for about a month now, I have been photographing Julie’s outfits and her accompanying performances on many days of the week. Some of my favorites so far:

I would like to use the Person In Time project to create a work that would contribute to this larger project. The relevant “time” component here is that we are documenting Julie over time, which is in itself based on the historical timelines of costume, queerness, and performance. Julie and I are interested in expressing our ideas non-traditionally (media more queer than photography), so ExCap provides a perfect opportunity to start.

First, I would be most excited to computationally create my own slit-scan camera and take strange images of Julie and her outfits with it. This was inspired by Golan’s description of my last project as slit-scanned spaciotemporal sculptures. I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant by “slit-scanned”, so I looked it up and I am absolutely obsessed with it. Slit-scanning is essentially a long-exposure photography technique, except instead of layering entire frames taken over time on top of each other, mere slits of the frame are captured and stitched chronologically left to right. This is the photography of time, not space. The images below are just a few of the incredibly beautiful applications of this technique.

Since I’d be making the camera myself, I see the potential for a lot of experiments as well: I could order the slits left to right, as is normally done, but I could also go right to left, up and down, and randomly, to name a few.

My second idea is to create a video like Kylie Minogue’s Come Into My World. I don’t know how I’d be able to do this easily without the precision of the robot arm, so I guess I’d program the robot arm to film videos of Julie doing different performances in an exact circle and layer them on top of each other.

Finally, I also think it would be interesting to document Julie’s outfits with photogrammetry instead of regular photography, perhaps suspending them from the ceiling with string (which I could remove in post-production) to get 3D versions of this: