Project #6 Experimental Camera

Please visit here to access the camera in p5.js.

move yourself around & press the screen and to see the afterimage effect

What does my camera do?

My camera shows how a computer webcam creates a mosaic based on image data. Those b&w and pixelated effects make it hard to focus on the target subject, confuses the viewer's eye, causing a feeling of disorientation. At the bottom, it shows the metadata, the current date, and time. The metadata is exposed below to show users of the hidden data and shapes that are already difficult to recognize with a pixelated screen.

Sketches & Design Process

One of the issues that people in modern society have to be aware of is personal data exposure. It is a topic that is often talked about in Critical Computation and Design for this Century classes. When I am writing this article, I am exposing my data and storing it somewhere. I'm putting a post-it on my webcam to cover up what I might be recording. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, also puts a post-it on his webcam to hide the camera. Continuing from my last assignment, which meant being aware of data exposure, this assignment can be seen as a series.

This is a photo of a mosaic effect using Photoshop.

After receiving this assignment, the idea that immediately came was to create a camera with a Lego Pop Art effect.

I made the camera black and white because the color was one of the most significant factors that could hide identities, such as skin color, hair, and clothes. It was able to hide some of the identity by simply changing the color to monotone.

One of my favorite artists, who comes to mind first when it comes to black and white, is Ryoji Ikeda. Ryoji Ikeda is a Japanese electronic composer and visual artist who has an international reputation for working convincingly across visual and sonic media. He coordinates sound, images, and mathematical concepts in large-scale immersive live performances and installations.

This is 'Datamatics', using pure data as a source for sound and visuals; datamatics combines abstract and mimetic presentations of matter, time, and space. Datamatics is the second audiovisual concert in the series. Projecting dynamic computer-generated imagery in pared-down black and white with striking color accents, the intense yet minimal graphic renderings of data progress through multiple dimensions.

Inspired by this, I put metadata at the bottom of the screen and put blocks using arrays at the screen's four corners. My camera made the subject's shape a little more difficult to recognize by adjusting the brightness effect that adjusts the pixels' size and brightness. When the mouse is pressed on the screen, it gives blendMode's 'difference' effect so that movement is slightly captured like an afterimage on the camera screen that has already been slowed by pixelation.

Other ideas I thought of were data metrics using the binary method and image thermal camera using blendMode.

Reflection

I am satisfied with the work I intended to do among the works I have done in the Critical Computation class so far. While the world is developing much more intelligently and conveniently through big data, it can be seen that to obtain big data, we are living a daily life of answering unwanted surveys such as our life patterns, likes, and tastes. So I think Big Data is a lump of contradictions with pros and cons. I grew up enjoying C.S.I and various investigations dramas so much that I felt like I made one of the various special effects in the drama, so this project was exciting.