User:Noemiino/RESEARCH DOCUMENT

Forward/Introduction

(tell us about yourself and your practice)
As a graphic designer I am trained to look at small visual details and make adjustments to them. I am interested in these details not just from a human perspective but how our new technologies enable us new ways of exploration. I want to include technology in my work as much as possible in form of interactions, new layers or as research experiments.

I look at digital craft and see the opportunity to work with my combined interests: analog + digital in one hybrid and that excited me. I am curious about how technology enables machines to recognize, think, design (?) and how humans can create conditions for these interactions to happen. In my opinion when technology is used interaction is already created, left for the designer is to make sure the conditions are the framework in which they happen.

In Pix-celling I look at the difference between human and computer interpretations of pixels and I try to find a new viewpoint or perhaps a starting point for something bigger.

Abstract

Pix-celling started off from restrictions of big high-quality formats on websites - this wiki allows a maximum of 2MB per item, in case of a gif this either has to be very short or the quality of it has to be reduced. When I reduced the following gif to 378 KB and displayed it at 800 px width it evolved beyond the image that it originally was. The pixels of the image came alive and became interesting in themselves.



This made me think in ways pixels can be exposed. I gathered materials which displayed a bigger image made out of smaller components. My interest lay in the craft of making these images but also the difference in displaying them on separate surfaces as print and digital images. I wanted to explore the information pixels carry for machines and people and how they can be interpreted and reinterpreted.

Central Question

Do we loose or gain information by distortion?

• Defining lost -- To define lost first I would have to define what is *found*.
  

found -- Looking at an image the is information to be found. Specifically in a portrait there is information about the person that makes them specific. Facial features that make them recognisable.
lost -- Manipulating part of the "found" information would lead to changing the specific features and making them unrecognisable.
part -- The part that is being manipulated are the pixels making up the digital image. The pixels contain information on the most zoomed in level.
digital image -- Capturing the digital image with a camera or webcam or kinect?
pixels -- What information does a pixel really contain? It is a block of color. What distortion can be made to a pixel?
-- Pixel has x & y position. Can you add it a z position? What happens when you start changing up one of these variables? Or 2? Or all three of them?
-- Can the information change from a color block to a graphic element? ASCII .

Relevance of the Topic

Understanding the quality of an image is essential as a visual designer working in the digital sphere. One has to understand the specifications required for each device to display the image correctly without distortion. And same goes for printing processes. Exporting the right quality image is part of the design practice.

However, usually, this process happens in achieving better quality for an image than it is and not the other way around. I wanted to explore the opposite of this and give value to the smallest component of the image.

DECOMPOSING & RECOMPOSING
I explored the small component of a visual from various perspectives from ASCII to pixel art in combination to Kinect, Unity designed 3D experiences to the RGB composition of a pixel. In all these examples I was looking at a way to visualize the smallest particle in relation to the whole image while maintaining the focus on it and not the whole. Again, usually this is done the other way around and sometimes I caught myself falling into the danger of wanting to do something for the bigger picture but through reflection an feedback I managed to stay focused.

Again it is paradoxically technology that demands better quality but is at the same time able to display low-quality image in an interesting way. Pix-celling is about exploring typography from a different perspective where these new high definitions allow very intricate details and maximum zoom-in power. How does a graphic designer still relevant in experimenting with typography in this era? I believe is by using the technology and setting new innovative conditions.

Hypothesis

(what do you think will happen or what will the effect be of your work?)

Visuals and experience

I think by dishumanating the portrait or presence of a person we can touch upon a more objective viewpoint. Do we still see ourselves in the pixels (AScii) or is that an alienated view? A new reality shown augmented into the real.

Research Approach

(how do you define and design your research? what activities/approaches/methods will you pursue while conducting your research?)

Key References

(how does your work relate to contemporary makers? what a key analogues/works of inspiration?)

Literature

(what texts will/can support this investigation?)

Experiments

(what are you going to test out and why)

Insights from Experimentation

(what have you pulled from your hands on practice based research?)

Artistic/Design Principles

(what is your own criteria for designing?)

Artistic/Design Proposal

(what do you propose to make)

AN installation where a kinect traces you as an ascii code in 3d space. so when you move close up you zoom into one pixel.

Realised work

(what did you actually make)

Final Conclusions

(what was the point? what do you take away?)

Bibliography

(what did you reference in this text (other texts, images, films, exhibitions)? Remember to use proper in-text citing!!!!!!!!!!
Body as interface! http://www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-3/from-gui-to-nui-microsofts-kinect-and-the-politics-of-the-body-as-interface/
emBody(text) { http://www4.ncsu.edu/~dmrieder/embodytext/