For this project, “In and Out,” a picture of myself was taken entering and exiting the room over the course of about six days using a motion detector app called iSpyConnect on a laptop. This laptop was placed in the middle of the room on a shoe shelf with the screen off. As a result of this pandemic, and the lockdown with it, I am in my room almost all of the time and this is much more compared to the time I spent prior to the lockdown. My room was only ever used to escape, to take a break from work or to sleep, but now it’s a place that I need to escape from. My workflow and daily habits have completely changed and I am now almost like a shell of my former self, but it’s difficult to escape from this. When it came down to how I presented the final 50 pictures I chose to use a grid and behind the pictures is a gradient from black to white to indicate the time of day and also as a separation marker between the different days. I chose black and white because life after lockdown has been pretty mundane and all the days blur into each other. The second part of the presentation includes pictures of the locations in my place that I might be in, this includes my bed, the bathroom, the kitchen, and the living room. I chose to take pictures of these spaces with me both in and out of them because I can only be in one space at a time. I wanted the viewer to create their own story in a sense of where I was and what I was doing. The last portion of this presentation is a video of the 50 pictures together and what I like about this is how fast the time goes in the video and things just blur into each other.

 

Process Images:

Above are the 3 different positions I was considering when setting up the laptop.

Above are the ways that I setup the camera for the self-portraits.

Me checking the settings of the app to make sure that it was working properly.

 

Reflection:

While doing this project I definitely felt conscious of the way that I interacted with my space, with how my hair looked, and how I was dressed. I did my best to make sure that this did not impact the actions I made but it was something I felt more aware of. The laptop had a camera protector on it but here I was exposing myself 24/7. I was also thinking about how people might judge me once they paid more attention to the times that I woke up or went to sleep. 

In the beginning of this project I was using the laptop and phone that I always use, but at some point they had to be moved so that I could use them. So I did not really like that because that also meant that the pictures could not be taken in the exact same position. Finding a free security app for my iPhone and MacBook was a long process, I was not successful with finding one for my phone but I eventually found one for my MacBook. Since I needed my MacBook more I tried to connect the camera on my phone with the security app on my laptop but unfortunately the app did not detect the motion from my phone. I remembered that I had an extra laptop and if that I could get a charger for it I could use that without having to interfere with it. So I went on another hunt to find an app that could work with it since it was a Dell laptop and came across iSpyConnect. This app took awhile for me to figure out how to use and was much more complicated compared to the one I had used on my MacBook, but it worked out eventually. Since I interacted with the area in front of the camera a good bit, this resulted in over 3000 pictures that were taken, having to sift through all of those to decide the final 50 took awhile and I also kept going back and forth on which part of the walking in and out process that I wanted to use. It was also an interesting process setting the camera up to take the self portraits in the different spaces, depending on the space it took awhile to figure out. The easiest part about this project was definitely coming in and out of my room haha.

Perry mentioned looking at all the pictures in which I interacted with the space in a certain way, for instance right when I put my hand on the door to open, or when I came into my room with a mask on. This is an interesting idea that I would have liked to include as well, to see the way in which I interacted with my space differently or in the same manner.