User:Jeanine Verloop/minor mindofthemachine

mind of the machine

PEOPLE

SANNE SCHILDER
Major // Photography
PAGE SANNE

JEANINE VERLOOP
Major // illustration
PAGE JEANINE

DATA BASE ASSIGNMENT

250+ reflection

visual essay

image generator algorithm

COMPRESSION

We really like the work of David Bowen. He uses a lot of organic input and mechanic output. In a few installation, he uses house flies as input. An example is when he let flies tweet by recording where the landed on a keyboard. Or when he tracked flies and translated that to a revolver pointing at you. He also used the routes the flies flew as an input for a milling machine. Our goal in this project was to create something physical.

Our first step was to figure out if we could track something. Sanne had earlier worked with a motion tracking code that detect motion in a video. We used that code to our advantage.

multi object tracker visual research

results

what we did

We compressed one hour of rain into a tangible, solid form.

We took a video (unfortunately we did not have the opportunity to film actual rain that week) of an hour of rain and tracked the motion with processing. Processing would give us an image with different shades of darkness. We put that .jpg into Cura 3D software. Normally you would use Cura to send images to the 3D printer, now we used it because it has a great feature where you can turn a jpg into a 3D model bases on grayscale. The final step was setting up the milling machine.

Milling was very time consuming, 6 hours to be precise (!)

step 1

step 2

step 3

step 4

the significance

During research and fabrication, we discussed and searched a lot for why we chose rain. Aside from the pattern we agreed were very pleasing we had no preset motive or deeper meaning.

We felt we had no particular reason to choose rain. Tim asked us multiple time, what the significance was of compression that moment of rain. People are drawn to moments of significance, moments worth remembering. Most people think back to moments with loved ones, birth, death. The 'big' moments. We did the opposite, we compressed a moment with no particular worth in itself. It is just rain, one hour.

visuals

SIDETRACK: EYE-SUCKING-INFORMATION

While milling the rain in the block of foam we were a bit conflicted about where to take it next. As a result of this conflict, we decided to take a little detour into tracking the eye.

In our first discussion, Jeanine mentioned how it could be interesting to play with the compression of the memory of a place. For example making an installation where every time you access the image (live feed) you would change the image. We really liked the idea of compressing or reducing our surroundings. We started talking about how you are constantly compressing everything around you. While typing this text, we are compressing our thoughts into something that -hopefully- makes sense to others.

When you think about how we constantly compress, we also choose to not compress certain things. With that in mind, we wanted to make an installation of some sort that would show what we are not compressing (by erasing what we've compressed). To do this we researched the possibility to track eye movement.

We found a useable code by (...) (?) and tried to understand what it is that she did. By reusing and tweaking it to our advantage we were able to track the eye and make it leave a trace where it had looked. We ended up using some leaked document from WikiLeaks.

For us, it was interesting that when you read the text, no one else could read it anymore. Because you had sucked the information from the screen.